Ethereum has always been PoW and the only thing that separates it from Bitcoin in this regard is its relative unpopularity. Further its switch to PoS has some big implications. For example: I can run an Ether node right now with very little money. This strengthens and diversifies the network. PoS shrinks the participant pool dramatically, effectively making it a centralized protocol that only the rich are allowed to participate in (or put another way, $100k is a hell of an initial investment for 99.99999% of people alive).

I was intentional in lumping crypto in with eugenics and phrenology, because they're all bad ideas that are super harmful for humanity. That's how bad climate change is!

But more broadly, this is just another example of a crypto person crying ignorance or ad hominem rather than having any cogent arguments or new information. The tech isn't that hard to understand. We get it. It is actually just bad.

You are jumping between claims. As you've acknowledged Ethereum will switch to PoS where your climate change claims are incorrect (as they already are when talking about crypto as a whole).

Your seperate PoS concerns of centralization (whether valid or not) at most make it as 'evil' as any other centralized service.

> You are jumping between claims. As you've acknowledged Ethereum will switch to PoS where your climate change claims are incorrect (as they already are when talking about crypto as a whole).

I don't think you should give them too much credit for a switch to PoS that hasn't actually happened yet. There's no intermediate benefit of "planning to switch."

I gather you never run a blue-green migration before?

The switch has already started. The PoS validators are already running. The time it is taking is just to make sure that the transition occurs safely and that there are enough diversity of clients and stakers in the network.

1. I'm not acknowledging anything. I think the switch happening is very up in the air, and the switch happening without irreparably destroying the community is also very up in the air. I think ETH devs agree, which is why it's been postponed so much.

2. If it's just as bad as what we have now, seems like a lot of effort for no reason right?

You can run a node without being a validator. It's the same as today with PoW, you can run a node without being a miner. Mining also requires a large investment in specialized equipment and energy if you have any hope of finding a block.

> You can run a node without being a validator.

Yeah but we're only talking about validations and mining. PoS gets rid of mining, but it's still the case that Ethereum is a very expensive distributed consensus system based on validation nodes. And again, for what reason?

There's a lot to address, but after PoS transitions you can still run a run node without 32 eth, it just won't play a role in finalization or production of a block.

As an aside: do you run a node?

The only things that are relevant here are mining and verification. PoS replaces mining, but you still need stake to verify.

> As an aside: do you run a node?

Hah is this some reference to PoW miners coming out swinging against PoS to protect their mining infrastructure investments?

1. Of course not

2. This is a great demonstration of how centralized these "decentralized" networks are; people are even worried about the PoW miner lobby.