And by far the most significant hindrance to moving away from proof of work is that there a number of significant players who have a large economic interest in PoW. Ethereum was promising this move many years ago, but it always was an extraordinarily low priority.

There are a lot of people with perverse biases. Many of the comments enthusiastically defending Bitcoin are people who are sitting on BTC and have watched it get pummelled due to its ludicrous enormous-energy-for-something-that-does-nothing-for-humanity reality (seriously -- if I see one more chart comparing the entirety of the financial industry with Bitcoin. The former powers the entire world. The latter powers some speculators, criminals, and a minuscule number of legitimate transactions).

I disagree about the priority, they literally didn't know what they were doing or how to do it just yet. The security demands this community wants are and were completely science fiction as there is no proof of stake network that has met the goals they are aiming for, and they are simply much closer to reality now.

There was poor governance and management that debilitated their ability to function during the 3 year bear market. And they got their act together. In the mean time, more product market fit was made apparent and upgrades to the instruction set for arbitrary execution was done to the network and continues to this day.

The Ethereum network consists of many-to-many relationships for approval transactions for ERC20 tokens to interact with other smart contracts. This wasn't even foreseeable 18 months ago, and 18 months before that the ERC20 protocol wasn't even ratified.

> Does nothing for humanity

Really? If that energy consumption problem wasn't there, what advantages does Ethereum have over Bitcoin? Would it even exist, since it offers many of the same features?

Ethereum natively supports smart contracts. Bitcoin doesn't support them natively; any attempt to add them has to be a separate layer on top.

That's why the past few years have seen a rise in fungible and non-fungible tokens (average merit of those aside for the sake of argument, since this is just answering the question "it offers many of the same features"), pretty much all of which are hosted on Ethereum or Ethereum code forks like Binance Smart Chain.

For more details on advantages of Ethereum over Bitcoin, and advantages other new blockchains have over Ethereum, please see my recent presentation:

https://capitalgram.com/posts/history-of-cryptocurrencies/

Interested to hear your thoughts on Polkadot. At the end of the first section, you stop the 'innovation train' at NPOS. Polkadot takes all the ideas presented in your article, combines them and adds a couple unique ideas such as parachains.

(Not the parent poster.) I've looked at it and think it looks interesting, but I think Ethereum may be approaching something like JavaScript's status, now. It's not necessarily technically ideal, but it has first-mover advantage, tons of network effects, and an entrenched position, so it might have already won.

I think there's a decent chance they may eventually pivot a bit and rebrand Polkadot or Substrate as an Ethereum layer 2 platform. They already seem to be leaning in that direction a bit.

Most of the development team of polkadot is the team that made eth.

So back to the OP's point, Ethereum minus smart contracts and efficient energy use is "nothing for humanity", as if the basic features of money haven't improved our standard of living and there's nothing wrong with central banks and the powerful that benefit from them. The energy used provides immense value today. The costs need to be internalized though.

> Ethereum minus smart contracts [...] is "nothing for humanity"

No shit, if you take away the defining feature of something, you will be left with very of value indeed.

That's like saying the web without HTTP is nothing for humanity.

The “as if” part means it can only be true if the regular money aspect of these two cryptos has no value, which is laughable.

* Its a technically flawed solution that now has so much hype, abandoning the idea would lead to further FUD, tarnishing the project's future direction. So we must go through the motions to appease the energy FUD warriors.

lol, Ethereum's Beacon Chain already been running since Dec 1. See https://beaconcha.in/ Please point me towards the flaws.

Point me at its purpose?

As far as I can tell, it was a trick to remove coin from circulation, locking it away where it could not be used again. The fact that people have tokenized these beacon coins on other chains to trade show that people want their money back!

No, it really doesn't. This is akin to saying because people take out second mortgages they really want their money back that they bought their house with.

Being able to leverage a committed sum of money via collateralization is as old as financial systems themselves.

If you can find any specific reasons for your take I'm very open to hearing about them?

In the world of hard money (bitcoin), leverage is extremely dangerous, you may never be able to repay the loan. You would not want to borrow a house worth of bitcoin in a 2nd mortgage -- you could never pay it back!

In the legacy financial world, 2nd mortgages just lead to private inflation of the fiat money supply (the money is being conjured out of nothing to pay for an asset that was already paid for). Nothing is produced, except some energy is burned updating centralized databases.

Having systems where both realities exist is great. I'm a fan of hard money. It is honest.

To establish "good enough" distributed consensus without burning absolutely enormous amounts of energy doing throwaway math problems?

I understand what they wanted to achieve, and I understand that they cannot achieve this. Seems that burning absolutely enormous amounts of energy is the only secure way of doing it. I guess rather than fight the universe, we better find a way to do it cleanly!

> and I understand that they cannot achieve this

Gonna need some citations here for this one.