Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge

Re:Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge by chrischattin on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @03:50PM (#27200112)

In Ethereum, you need 32 ETH, which is around ~$120k. That's prohibitive a normal person. After EIP1559 goes into effect, it's not out of the question that the price could rise 7x given the power laws at play. What happens when the cost to stake a node is $1M+? What happens 50 years from only the very richest .00001% can afford to run a node?

I'm concerned EIP1559 and PoS is a very short sighted implementation that will move towards centralization of the network.

There should be a floating minimum, or have no minimum at all to run a node. Not sure the exact tech solution, or I'd be submitting a pull request :).

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Re:Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge by miohtama on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @04:43PM (#27200799)

You can do pooled staking with smaller amounts, with little bit lost security:

https://capitalgram.com/posts/ethereum-2.0-staking-and-stake...

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Re:Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge by meowkit on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @03:53PM (#27200154)

32 ETH was set when it cost much less.

That can always be changed if the number or validators is not sufficient to decentralize the network.

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Re:Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge by roskelld on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @03:58PM (#27200219)

Genuine question: Who decides that?

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Re:Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge by fredfoobar on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @04:10PM (#27200350)

When there is a prominent founder, everyone usually tends to defer to them (in this case, Vitalik, see what happened to ETC vs ETH).

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Re:Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge by chrischattin on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @04:03PM (#27200278)

That's was my point. The ability to stake shouldn't be based on an arbitrary and temporary exchange rate. What happens if USD/ETH is $0.0001? $1B? It should still work regardless of the exchange rate.

Current implementation depends on the exchange rate and creates an incentive structure towards centralization.

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Re:Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge by exo762 on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @05:39PM (#27201578)

> Current implementation depends on the exchange rate

No, it does not. You are staking ETH, not USD. Essentially, you are staking a percentage of all ETH, percentage capped from below.

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Re:Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge by chrischattin on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @08:16PM (#27203043)

The decision to use 32 ETH was a trade off based on the exchange rate at the time, 32ETH being ~$5k, which the devs thought was enough so that it wouldn’t be cost prohibitive to get involved and hurt enough to stay honest. When the exchange rate changes dramatically, like it did and will in the future, it changes the incentive structure in staking. So, yes, the current implementation’s incentive structures do depend on the exchange rate.

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Re:Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge by cdiddy2 on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @09:29PM (#27203538)

32 ETH wasn't chosen randomly. There is a cost to having too many validators on the network. 32 ETH was chosen to make sure that didn't happen while still being low enough to allow for a lot of validators.

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Re:Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge by fredfoobar on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @03:57PM (#27200202)

Yeah yeah, everything can always be changed in the future.

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Re:Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge by everfree on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @10:23PM (#27203825)

Ethereum regularly undergoes hard forks to change its parameters. There's no schelling point over protocol specifics with Ethereum like there is with, say, Bitcoin.

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Re:Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge by hanniabu on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @03:58PM (#27200218)

There are discussions to lower the ETH collateral requirements. Right now there is no validator cap so that will lead to issues. The goal is to first set a max validator cap with a rotating validator pool. However, there's still higher priority items to complete first like the merge, unlocking withdrawals, and likely also sharding. Given that, it's liking like this change would come 2 years from now unless priorities change (and assuming there's consensus for such a change).

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Re:Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge by russianbandit on Wednesday May 19, 2021 @12:00AM (#27204391)

We’ll solve that problem in 50 years, don’t you think? BTC and ETH are just pioneers in the future of financial systems.

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