Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge

Re:Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge by oehpr on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @11:54AM (#27196376)

But this isn't proposed regulation to prevent an "economy oriented around energy being put into finding hashes".

It's literally regulation to stop "Proof of work". Which is a generic algorithm that can be applied to other circumstances.

It could have applications in CAPTCHA's, or anti-spam.

It could be a critical component of other decentralized technologies, not just blockchain crypto currencies.

Making this math illegal JUST to kill cyptocurrencies seems a tad much, right?

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Re:Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge by pornel on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @12:34PM (#27197169)

Proof of Work used for decentralized consensus is maximally wasteful by design. It has to be a race to burn more resources than anyone else can. It's unfixable.

Governments already have regulations for energy efficiency, waste and pollution, and for most things it's possible to negotiate reasonable limits.

For PoW it's not possible. If you put an upper limit on its wastefulness, it'll be a limit on its security. Even if we had a Dyson Sphere, PoW would eventually eat more than half of it just to be secure.

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Re:Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge by the_local_host on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @12:05PM (#27196604)

Isn't proof-of-work intrinsically wasteful though, as a proxy for costing money (e.g. instead of paying money directly for the right to mine BTC, you buy electricity and burn it)? In any context other than cryptocurrencies it seems like microtransactions would be a better choice.

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