Are any other blockchains using close to as much energy as BTC and ETH?!?
It doesn't happen all at once, it's a transition. There are billions staked in ETH2 already.
> But we don't know how PoS will go for ETH once it has moved.
There's quite a few PoS coins that are working well, Algorand comes to mind.
> Besides, there are many other negative exernalities that the move to PoS won't get rid of.
Such as?
This video[1] covers a bunch and doesn't even mention energy usage much. Off the top of my head: rampant fraud[2] (e.g. so-called rugs in the NFT space and stolen artwork being minted as NFTs), financialization of everything, strong incentives to build intrusive DRM to enable "true" NFT ownership, creating incentives to hoard vs. invest thanks to deflationary currency, and loss of privacy (everything on a public blockchain).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
[2] Oh and thanks to how blockchain technologies work, fraudulent transactions are often irreversible.
Enabling fraud, enabling ransomware, enabling authoritarian dictators to enrich themselves. Furthermore there's still Bitcoin that will never move to PoS, and the popularity of ETH also swaps over to Bitcoin and other cryptos.
Yes, yes, there are also scams in fiat money blabla. The problem here is, that cryptos are a strictly zero-sum game and don't add any value to anybody except people who are able to dump their coins to the next greater fool. So why should we accept all these disproportionate externalities?
I don't think simply yelling "fraud" and "scams" is enough to dissuade people anymore. New talking point please.
Honestly the anti-crypto sentiment here is ridiculous. I hope people know that the same people preaching against it here are gobbling up crypto as fast as they can while trying to dissuade others.
Only a person who extends their crypto-scam thinking to others would think this way. I can assure you that I don't hold any crypto, and that I'm pretty certain that the majority of outspoken crypto sceptics don't hold any crypto.
If you think it will be more lucrative in the future it helps to extend the current prices by investing while dissuading others to invest.
They'd have to get in at a later, much higher price in that scenario.
iTunes gift cards, iTunes gift cards, oil.
Can we ban those too?
But yes. Let's ban it.
Incidentally, while searching for the topic I also found an article[2] from August 2021 with this quote:
> Meanwhile, crypto mining manufacturers like Bitmain and Innosilicon are on track to release new Ethereum mining machines this year, all while knowing that Ethereum’s transition to a PoS network is just five months away, effectively making those machines redundant.
I guess the manufacturers were right.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/ehpp8m/will_the_m...
[2] https://www.benzinga.com/markets/cryptocurrency/21/08/224855...
The computer I'm typing this on is using gminer to mine on the flexpool.io mining pool. But it's just using a computer I would've purchased anyway. Some miners have tens of thousands of dollars invested in mining equipment or more.
Hashrate has increased from 14.86 to 1001 Th/s in the past 5 years and is at an all-time high. Since "transitioning" to PoS, it has not gone down.
Yes, the hashrate graph has a positive slope over large time series, but it does go down at various points along the time series so therefore saying "the hashrate has only gone up" is a false statement.
I have run into this in about 1 out of 50 interactions on HN over the years and I find it most helpful to point this out and mean no disrespect by it.
It was moving to PoS last year and the year before that. Now it's June, but I heard probably delayed to July.
One telling thing is that ETH miners not only haven't sold their GPUs they're continuing to buy more at greater than MSRP. It's unlikely there will be a good alternate coin to mine after ETH. Some are planning to move to ETC (Ethereum Classic) but it can't absorb the hashrate of ETH and be profitable.
ETC currently has 24.46 Th/s while ETH has 961.14 Th/s. ETC price has been going up dramatically in the last week ($25 to $40 per coin) but it would have to go up about 20x more to absorb that hash rate.
Not surprising really, shell games with insider information being traded against the sheeple is a core aspect of the crypto industry. Who knows if this time is just like the last time and all the times before?
[1]: https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-power-no-more/
When I compared Ethereum to a Raspberry pi I was continuing the comparison from the root comment. The point of the comment was that, although POS would produce a significant reduction in power consumption, it would still consume a significant amount of power compared to the computing power of the network.
Discussions about if Ethereum has extra utility that offsets that extra powerdraw is outside of this comment thread, since the restriction that consider Ethereum as a "global single core raspberry pi" are given by the root comment.
I didn't mean to (and don't think i did) present that in any tricky way, and I think you're projecting an argument onto my comments that I'm not making.
[1]: https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption/