> Instead of talking about these "gas fees" in terms of their monetary value, we should measure them in terms of tons of CO2, or perhaps its equivalent acres-of-the-Amazon-rainforest-lit-on-fire. I'm 100% serious.

That's.. not how this works. The miner receives a block reward which is a combination of a fixed reward (2 ETH right now) + tips from people trying to get their transaction (typically ~0.2 ETH) [0]. The rest of the transaction fees are burned by the network.

In effect this means that miners are motivated to mine (and hence use CO2) based upon the block rewards. During periods of high network usage, they aren't magically procurring more miners, and hence they aren't actually using more electricity. And since the vast majority of the reward is burnt anyways, during high periods of usage, the miner reward doesn't actually go up that much.

Regardless of all of that, Ethereum will be on proof of stake within a year (wouldn't be surprised if it's 3 or 4 months at this point), at which point the CO2 argument will go away altogether).

[0] https://etherscan.io/block/14700751

> And regardless of all of that, Ethereum will be on proof of stake within a year

I’ve been hearing this since 2017. I won’t believe it until I see it.

There's a site made to track the details of what needs to happen before the merge. https://wenmerge.com/ it still lacks specific date commitments. The focus is on "when it's ready" given that ~0.5 trillion dollars are in the system.

I believe the date it currently counts down had been planned as the merge date/deadline but has explicitly been postponed already.

ethmerge.com still says Q2 too, but a prediction market https://polymarket.com/market-group/ethereum-merge-pos sees only a 75% chance of it happening this year, and a 61% chance of it happening by the end of Q3.

Yup.

> The ultimate goal of the Ethereum Foundation for 2017 is to follow the vision of Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and make a move from a proof of work to a proof of stake protocol

https://cointelegraph.com/news/ethereums-2017-roadmap-flexib...

Yes and in 2017 there hadn't been a proof of stake network running in parallel for a year and a half, with 10% of all ETH deposited and locked in place until after proof of work is killed off. Nor had there been multiple public testnets for the merge process.

I'm just an outsider, but to OP's point, in 2017 they had none of what you just cited yet they were making the "within a year" claims, and continued to do so year after year. One can't help but draw a comparison to the boy who cried wolf.

Edit: This isn't me taking a position, just observing.

I'm also skeptical, but let's remember that the point of the fable is not "the boy's repeated claims lost credibility because the wolf never came", but rather "the people eventually learned to ignore the boy's claims and were caught by surprise when the wolf finally came" ツ

But if PoS comes after everyone stops caring about ETH (or PoS), it still fails. PoS isn't the hard part. Getting ETH successfully onto PoS is the hard part.

According to the people designing and building this stuff, PoS itself was a lot harder than merging it with the rest of the network.

For PoS there was all sorts of complicated game theory, a whole new protocol, and trying to figure out every possible way to attack it.

For the merge, it's basically just changing the fork choice rule of the existing network, so instead of going with the fork with the most work, it goes with the one being chosen by the PoS network.

They still haven’t solved the nothing at stake issue. I don’t see any progress being made regarding game theory.

Locked deposits and slashing solve nothing-at-stake.

I don't think it'll ever happen because the miners don't want it. They've invested millions into GPUs and they'll all become worthless once Eth switches to PoS.

Or they'll find another coin to mine.

$30 billion in ETH locked on the PoS network will be worthless if they don't switch.

Meanwhile, there's no technical way for the miners to keep the switch from happening.

>Meanwhile, there's no technical way for the miners to keep the switch from happening.

Right, because it’s never happened that miners disagree with a change and split into a different chain…

They can certainly do that, but that doesn't keep the merge from happening. It just means there might be a PoW chain on the side. It'll be up to the market to decide whether it's worth anything, and if it's not worth much, it won't support much mining activity.

So far, the miners don't appear to be organizing a chain split. And it would take some organizing; they'd need to defuse the difficulty bomb, get exchange support, try to get support from the people running tokens backed by custodied assets, etc. Perhaps most critically, they'd need to get a large portion of the user community to believe that PoW is better and worth sticking with. That's not happening either, and Ethereum users are very much looking forward to PoS.

Remind me how many existing splits there are?

One. In that case, unlike today, a large portion of the user community believed that the alternate approach was a better idea.

And the market did make a pretty definite decision on the two forks' relative worth. ETH today is worth $2800 and ETC is at $26.

More than one, but alright. The point is the mechanism exists to just fucking ignore PoS and if miners don’t think there is enough in it for them, it won’t happen.

Of course miners can keep their PoW chain going. That doesn't mean anyone else will care about it, or that they can stop the PoS chain from going live.

There have been lots of Ethereum forks, but ETC is the only case where the old chain stayed active. In every other case the old chain was abandoned. (Bitcoin on the other hand has multiple active chain splits.)

>Regardless of all of that, Ethereum will be on proof of stake within a year (wouldn't be surprised if it's 3 or 4 months at this point), at which point the CO2 argument will go away altogether).

Quoting for posterity.

Do you think this is too optimistic?

https://manifold.markets/LarsDoucet/will-ethereum-switch-to-...

It looks like it changed pretty dramatically since you posted (it's now at a 24% chance of occurring before the end of the year). This site [0] uses actual money, and more closely lines up with what I expect (although still more pessimistic than I am).

[0] https://polymarket.com/market-group/ethereum-merge-pos

I have no position.

I'd be happy to make a bet based upon this statement.

See my sister comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31241852 you can bet there, using free paper money and if you win donate (via conversion) to charity which is cool.

Is ETH actually going to be PoS within a year? It feels like ETH has been “about to be PoS within a year” for like five years now.

They're waiting on Tesla to deliver on FSD first. But that's going to be within the next two years.

After the Year of the Linux Desktop

At this point, it could be possible to get Duke Nukem Forever to run on the Hurd, so never say never.

That’s about when fusion is going to be commercially viable I think?

Just in time for the tenth anniversary of the year of luigi

I think the FSD requires PoS first.

At this point I can't help but feel like the main deliverable of "ETH going PoS" is being able to dismiss claims about the obvious wastefulness of the system, not the actual transition.

I feel like it's obvious that the goal of the the transition wouldn't just be the transition itself? I'm confused.

There's some difference between "so they can dismiss claims about wastefulness" and "so it isn't wasteful" but that's a pretty small distinction. I don't really care which of those two is a bigger motivator.

Sorry that was unclear. I mean that by claiming that PoS is ready and just around the corner, one can have the cake and eat it too by claiming that the waste issues will be solved soon, without actually having to make the risky political decision to do so. Just delay it every half year to allay the concerns of people that are considering buying in, and hope nobody cares anymore by the time the bubble pops.

Or perhaps the bust is a great time to generate some credulous positive news coverage.

The difference is that if they're greenwashing then they don't need to actually deliver.

> It feels like ETH has been “about to be PoS within a year” for like five years now

Likely because you don't actually follow the development milestones, and are just synthesizing a conclusion based on social media headlines/comments.

Successful testnets for the merge have been launched and merge execution from a shadow-fork of the mainnet to a PoS testnet have been completed in the last 2 months. As far as I am aware, no merge date has ever been set and all previous timelines were speculation, not missed deadlines.

I would recommend people sign up for an ETH feed or newsletter (e.g. the ETH Foundation blog https://blog.ethereum.org/2022/03/23/finalized-no-34/) and stop letting naive comments on hacker news/reddit/twitter dictate their opinions on the state of things like crypto.

> As far as I am aware, no merge date has ever been set and all previous timelines were speculation, not missed deadlines.

I'm not deep in that world, but as far as I can tell (from wandering on the blog you posted) there still aren't any deadlines to miss.

As we all know, strategic ambiguity is a hallmark of any good financial system.

The heartbeat PoS network is running today and has been running for over a year now. The next step is to merge the PoW consensus model onto the PoS network.

The last date was supposed to be around June, but seems like that will get pushed to August (or later) now. Yes, it is comical that the dates keep slipping.

That said, changing the consensus model for a network with multi billion $'s worth of value stored in it, isn't something you just do with a lot of thoughts and prayers. I don't blame them for taking their time with this transition.

> It feels like ETH has been “about to be PoS within a year” for like five years now.

Except that it is.

Imagine promising your clients and telling them to wait 'for a year' for the team to fix these fundamental issues in your product and have them lose millions on your missed estimates whilst you keep postponing and delaying the fixes for 5 years.

At some point, these clients will give up waiting and move elsewhere. Happened to the first NFT project on Ethereum (CryptoKitties) and now BAYC is considering doing the same.

So given that situation, the longer they delay and postpone it the worse it gets.

The merge (end of PoW) won't fix gas prices [1], which is why these projects move onto other (theoretically less secure) networks.

The transition to ETH2 (which is also now called something else [2]) is still an undefined date target.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=eth+merge+gas+prices

[2] https://blog.ethereum.org/2022/01/24/the-great-eth2-renaming...

> Imagine promising your clients and telling them to wait 'for a year' for the team to fix these fundamental issues in your product and have them lose millions on your missed estimates whilst you keep postponing and delaying the fixes for 5 years.

Basically any large organization IT project, defense project or anything which a politician touches after the sign off, then.

Close, but even worse.

Except there are no regulations around it or legally-binding contracts to protect these projects and we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars lost with little to no way for compensation or any legal case. Not even suing the creators would do anything for those losses.

Since Crypto is still a wild-west, projects like Ethereum are free to mislead their investors into loses and when they did eventually lose millions over a hack, suing them was futile. So the creators reversed the entire chain, defeating the whole point of immutability of Ethereum.

It's been more than 5 years since the move to PoS was expected for 2016. Everyone knows how both expensive, slow and inefficient Ethereum still is today for anything on-chain and even some have given up waiting on this sunken cost contraption to improve and looked else where.

BAYC is moving off ETH?

I'd say I'm 95% confident that it will be within a year. The code is written, and multiple waves of simulated merges have occurred. The last 2 found small, non-blocking bugs that were fixed, so it's a matter of when, not if at this point.

I think they're talking about the same year when Linux will become mainstream for desktops.

Your position seems to be that CO2 isn't linked to computing specific transactions, it's just the amount of mining on the network at any given time. But that could still very easily be expressed in terms of CO2. I.e. "during the time these transactions were monopolizing the network, the carbon equivalent of n acres of rainforest were burnt".

Proof of stake doesn't actually eliminate the carbon impact of these systems, it just improves the efficiency. There are still many computers running for the express purpose of buying autographed drawings of monkeys.

The entire ETH VM is running at about 0.8 MIPS right now. Yes. That is not an exaggeration, current gas limit is 30 million / 3 gas for simpliest add instruction / 12 seconds per block. The calculation power of the network is absolutely inconsequential to the operation of the network. 99.999% of all the energy used is just for Proof of Work. Once they move to Proof of Stake, if they even do, most of the power usage will be to run the hard drives to hold the increasingly massive ledger that will spawn from it.

For humour sake, if I had time i would set up a raspberry pi to run psql and node and provide an alternative centralised blockchain that would compete computationally.

If you manage to convince all the millions of people that the data on your raspberry pi is valid and you pinky-swear that you are not going to manipulate their funds, go for it.

Works for binance and many other centralized chains!

The issue isn't how much computing power (aka carbon) does the network NEED. The issue is how much computing power the network consumes.

Depending on the implementation of PoS, there could be all kinds of incentives or pressures for a lot of distributed computing power to get thrown at it, despite it only needing a fraction of that.

None of that is a problem if the system is #1 displacing other higher consuming systems and #2 not actively harming people.

Re: #1 So far most of what I've seen out of blockchain seems additive - it's not replacing old systems, it's layering on new systems. But it's still early days, maybe that'll change.

As for #2, well, it's hard to trace the exact benefits and harms of blockchain we've seen so far. Which leaves me to fall back on history. You can call me a commie if you want to, but a system that benefits capital over labour usually shakes out to benefit a few while harming many ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It improves the efficiency 10000-fold. You can run a Ethereum validator node on a 10W celeron, underclock it, and still be fine.

There are ~380k validators on the beacon chain now. There are 20M PS5 + Xbox sold already. A video game console consumes as much as 300W during usage, and even on idle can consume as much as a validator.

Seems like someone should go update the wikipedia article then

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake

> In 2021 a study by the University of London found that in general the energy consumption of the Proof-of Work based Bitcoin was about 1,000 times higher than that of the highest consuming proof of stake system that was studied

1,000x is not 10,000x

> They also couldn't find the energy consumption of a proof of stake system on a large scale as such a system does not exist at the time of the report.[16][17]

Big systems have big side effects. As others have said, I'll believe it when I see it.

You can see it already [0].

Eth PoS network already exists, what is missing is for the transition to be completed (aka, the "Merge")

[0]: https://beaconscan.com/statistics

The 380k validators concerns me a little, that's a lot of computing power burnt making sure we know who owns the monkey jpg. But I don't expect you would see the true reality of unexpected side effects until a system like this goes live and there is $$ to be made.

That's not just a "monkey jpg", and your comment would be a lot more valid if you dropped the sarcasm.

Anyway: 380k validators at 10W and assuming the cost of the kwH to be $0.25 (which is more than the world's average cost) amounts to ~8 million USD /year. That seems to me more than acceptable if it means that we are securing a blockchain that is already holding more than ~500B in assets.

I can not, and I will not, drop the sarcasm. If blockchain is the future, it deserves to be mocked every bit as much as the bits of paper it replaces, probably more. If it's not the future, then it's even funnier (in a sickening way) that humans decided to create 500B worth of monkey jpgs while the climate imploded around them.

Also, for the record, your back-of-the-envelope estimate - 32,000,000 kwh assuming I reversed it correctly - corresponds to about 27,200,000 lbs of carbon @ 0.85lbs/kwh - the average for all US electricity production in 2020.

Convert from lbs to 12337.7125 metric tons, divided by the 141 mT of carbon stored per acre of rainforest. Which makes the answer:

87.5 acres of rainforest burnt per year by PoS, before full adoption.

Adoption of the network is not related to its electricity consumption. The number of validators is a function of how many people want to invest (capital and resources) to secure the network.

And forgive me if I don't act all-too-shocked by your numbers, judging from all your posts about iOS and Apple stuff, I can easily see that your talk is cheap. Come back when your consumer habits actually match your concern about the environment.

> The number of validators is a function of how many people want to invest (capital and resources) to secure the network.

My point isn’t that every new user adds n new validators. My point is that larger the network and the more money involved, the more reasons there are to be a validator. They’re linked, just not directly.

As for my own activities, first - my carbon output doesn’t negate your carbon output, they’re both something we need to tackle. Second - I’d be the first one to say that the apple tech ecosystem has huge carbon costs that haven’t been reckoned with. That’s a big part of why I’ve been refocusing my attentions in the 6 years since 2016 when I last posted something about iOS.

> My point is that larger the network and the more money involved, the more reasons there are to be a validator.

Not exactly. Even for PoS, there will be a threshold where it is not as profitable to be a validator, leading people to rebalance their ETH allocation.

Still nothing compared to the amount of CO2 and environmental destruction caused by tourists competing for likes on their social media posts.

What makes you think the POS change will happen within a year at this point? Its been continually delayed, and the last word is that it will be "a few months after June"

Because of the constant consistent progress, the second "shadow merge" completing successfully (testing the change to POS), the little to no bugs found in the various POS clients during these tests, etc.

The slowness is a feature, an upgrade like this has to go perfectly, too much money is at stake.

That is a bit like saying Amazon shareholders are only going to buy for the AWS revenue and not the Amazon.com sales.

Miners of all people do detailed calculations to the nth degree. “Gas war”s will make more incentive for people to start buying up more cards and heating their basements.

Thanks for this explanation. It helps to hear that about ETH.

I'm not a fan of Yuga or "land" sales on blockchains, but this argument comes out every time there is something even tangentially related to proof of work blockchains. There is not a significant marginal expenditure of electricity per nft minted or transferred. The same order of magnitude of energy is expended to ensure the security of the blockchain whether a large NFT mint happens or not so long as the blockchain exists.

What really happened here was that the company that launched this did it in a way that congested the ethereum network and an auction essentially occurred in "gas" to use the network for this purpose for a couple hours. Instead, the company should have pre-allocated guaranteed minting on a lottery basis so it didn't devolve into a "gas" auction or, increased supply to match demand, which they knew in advance (like you said, limits here are artificial).

> The same order of magnitude of energy is expended to ensure the security of the blockchain whether a large NFT mint happens or not so long as the blockchain exists.

That's not completely true. The amount of resources wasted per hour are proportional to the value of the coin. Lacking any genuine uses for for cryptocurrencies, people determine coin value by things like transaction volume, market capitalization, influencer endorsements and active wallets instead. Thus every additional user, transaction and especially the common million-dollar wash trades designed to pump their respective projects, contribute significantly to the waste that is generated.

That's only true in the long term. It's not true as applied to this particular sale.

https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_network_hash_rate

A better way to look at the gas price is that is the cost of decentralization.

One single entity being the source of truth will always be cheaper than a blockchain verifying a transaction. The caveat is if that cost is worth it.

For buying tangible goods, the gas price might be worth it since Visa/MC control what you can sell online and payment processors can be circumvented using crypto. That is a pain point.

For intangible goods, the gas price is simply not worth it. What pain point exists for owning digital goods that would require decentralization? In my opinion, none.

Something like BOYC couldn't have been build in a traditional centralized manner. 4 founders had the idea of this club and were able to build it up on the back of Ethereum without any permission needed or their own infrastructure. It might not be worth it, but that's something unique that hasn't been possible before.

Serious question: what did they actually build?

They create images and sell them on someone else's network. I could list a JPG on eBay without having to run any infrastructure either.

Listing jpg’s on eBay wouldn’t get you a cut every time one of those jpgs was sold. You couldn’t easily airdrop items to holders of your apes, etc.

They built a weird business that made them rich.

If it wasn't built on crypto hype, it wouldn't have been popular.

The best way to get people to care about carbon emissions as a cost is to tax carbon emissions. But unfortunately, we live in a world where increasing gas prices immediately cause calls for gas subsidies even from supposedly progressives.

People get upset because it effectively becomes a regressive tax structure. The end game of taxing carbon has poorer people spending a larger percentage of their income paying taxes...even if they're consuming the same amount of resources as the rich.

So when Exxon gets hit with a carbon tax, what do you think happens? Gas and Oil prices stay the same? Absolutely not! They increase, and consumers end up paying the difference. This doesn't just affect residential energy prices either. Production and distribution prices increase for every good/service consumed. Normal every day citizens end up footing the bill for corporations.

Which is why the most suggested thing I've seen is taxing carbon and then distributing that evenly to all citizens. Anyone using less than the mean would benefit (which would cover the lowest earners because they're least likely to have cars and high energy use), while also having everyone incentivised to lower usage (which also means you can set the rates even higher).

> Normal every day citizens end up footing the bill for corporations.

Corporations are made of people. It's all just people doing things. Taxing anything is always taxing people which is a non-interesting statement.

Redistribution would not nearly be enough to offset the economic damage to the lower class. A big percentage will be lost to bureaucracy. Inflation would skyrocket. Those with assets see all the benefit of inflation, while the poor people with no assets have their purchasing power eroded away. Housing will become even less affordable. There's no free lunch.

> Corporations are made of people. It's all just people doing things. Taxing anything is always taxing people which is a non-interesting statement.

This is a ridiculous point. Surely you understand the different between things like income, sales, estate, capital gains, and corporate taxes? They all affect radically different individuals. I absolutely do not think that poor people should pay to clean the earth for the elites.

…and those citizens would be incentivized to pursue alternatives: car-pooling, biking, public transit, walking, EVs, along with the public/private investment in those modes.

Making it costlier for consumers and corporations to pollute the environment so that they change their practices to more sustainable options is the whole point of the carbon tax.

You're missing the point. It would deeply widen the already large gap between the upper and lower classes. And the worst part: it still wouldn't fix the problem. The really carbon expensive aspects of society come from industrialization. Fossil fuels are not "optional". Without them none of the global supply chains would function. VERY few would have electricity in their homes.

Building infrastructure would be insanely expensive to build with a carbon tax.

> Production and distribution prices increase for every good/service consumed

That sounds like a feature as consumption is one of the core problems.

> Normal every day citizens end up footing the bill for corporations

Corporations are serving demand. You could say citizens end up paying a more accurate cost for their consumption, with environmental costs properly accounted for.

And we could redistribute the tax revenue back to the citizens, starting with those who are suffering most and are least responsible for the climate emergency.

That's trivial to fix by giving poor folks $5K each and then it's their choice if they want to spend it on gas. Aka a subsidy for not buying gas.

You can (and should) debate what the exact numbers should be, but we already do this today with tax credits and welfare for the poor. It's a a solved problem.

> That's trivial to fix by giving poor folks $5K each and then it's their choice if they want to spend it on gas. Aka a subsidy for not buying gas.

See my sibling comment. This is dramatically underestimating the economic damage to those with lower income. Literally everything will become more expensive. Things like food, housing, infrastructure, medical care...

> ...but we already do this today with tax credits and welfare for the poor. It's a a solved problem.

Hey man, if you've solved our carbon emissions problem no strings attached you'll have changed the world. How are the current tax credits and welfare systems "solved"? Social Security is expected to collapse in the within 15 years.

An increase in gas fees doesn't correspond to an increase in energy consumed/CO2 produced. The network was chugging along at its usual hash rate like always, but this sudden demand for transactions creates a bidding war for the existing gas (computation) available. The fact that the gas rates rose so high shows that the network's energy consumption didn't increase.

Of course, in the long term, exorbitant gas fees produce some incentive for more miners to join and burn more CO2.

This is wrong though. During the sale, the fees were much higher, but the CO2 emissions remained constant.

It's just not the case that you can "talk about gas fees in terms of tons of CO2".

You should talk about the CO2 emissions of the Ethereum network. It's not 1:1 with fees in any sensible way.

I'm admittedly not very knowledgeable about the Web3/Crypto space beyond the basics - are all of these fees also publicly visible on a ledger?

It seems like someone could build a pretty sobering dashboard that shows exactly what you describe if this data is readily available.

I've wanted to dabble in the space purely so I could understand it more deeply, but am not really interested in the hype. However, building visualizations to help people understand the insanity...sounds like an interesting project.

The gas fees don't really correlate to any energy usage. They're actually a fee for computation on the block. It's no different than the Bitcoin miner fee, except it's based upon how much code is being included and the current network demand. It still blows my mind people think it is acceptable that the network eat their transaction fee if the transaction doesn't go through, especially when these fees are so high (as if now it can cost $2k to do any sort of NFT stuff).

Imagine sending $100 to your mom with your bank and then the bank charges you $2,000 and then the transaction doesn't go through because someone sneezed on the keyboard at the bank and forgot to press send and then the bank keeps the $2000 and your mom doesn't get the $100. Only in this case they didn't sneeze on the keyboard, the transaction calculation actively changed to be $3000 and if only you had $3000 in your account your transaction would've gone through so it's your fault your bank didn't have enough money to send your mom $100.

> It still blows my mind people think it is acceptable that the network eat their transaction fee if the transaction doesn't go through, especially when these fees are so high (as if now it can cost $2k to do any sort of NFT stuff).

I agree that this is ludicrous, but I don’t think that people so much accept it as that they tolerate it. Since, for most people (albeit not all), the only utility of cryptocurrencies today is to get rich, it doesn’t really make any sense to abandon a network that sucks from a UX point of view in favor of a much better network, if you believe that the alternative network will net you much less money.

Or more like someone is depositing millions into their bank account in small coins and it’s occupied all the tellers in the bank and no one is available to deposit your granny’s 20€ check

Yes, it is publicly available. The blockchain keeps a record of every transaction, which includes how much gas was spent.

Here are a few https://etherchain.org/burn https://ultrasound.money/ https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_supply

Platforms don't show this to people because they want people to trade. People that trade don't look for this information/live in blissful ignorance because they would feel bad otherwise.

If anything, by now we should accept that showing people numbers isn't the right way to make them aware of climate change.

> It seems like someone could build a pretty sobering dashboard that shows exactly what you describe if this data is readily available.

Crypto relies on people who don't know to look at dashboards.

Gas fees are publicly visible on the ledger, but not necessarily their value in USD or other irl currency. But you can get that easily enough from exchange APIs and other sources.

Blockchains use the same energy whether there are transactions or not.

This bolsters the anti Proof of Work/blockchain argument if you understood it. Which ironically means understanding blockchains instead of just finding the nearest convenient reason to not bother understanding them.

It's kind of like trying to outwit other traders in the stock market, isn't it? Just a bunch of people building elaborate systems to gamble.

Stock market trading is actually super efficient energy wise, comparatively, due to its centralized nature in a trusted environment. No need for proof of work or proof of stake, so no need to spin cycles for crypto trust theater (because you can still be prosecuted and sued if you steal crypto and it’s worth someone’s time to obtain justice; code as law until the cuffs are on or wallets are blacklisted at exchanges).

In this example, Ethereum is this enormous, slow distributed runtime moving image receipts and tokens around.

You can expand and contract the 'stock market' to whatever shape and energy density your argument requires. Does it include all the energy required to keep alive the people who work to sustain it? Does it include investors, the wealth it generates and all the super yachts bought with it? Or on the othet side, is it just the near energy free idea of what the stock market is?

If ethereum ever achieved adoption even close to a fraction of what stock trading has, then you'd have the same problems and overhead.

As it stands, the apples to apples comparison has any centralized, trusted network being more efficient than [attempted] trustless, proof of work like ethereum.

There are already a hundred different crypto exchanges (more than regular ones, possibly)

We do not count the people working on these exchanges as a part of crypto energy cost. So your argument is wrong, actually.

That's because you don't need the same scale of people to run a cryptocoin. It does it itself, more or less, with some maintainers. You can trade value with anyone anywhere in the world without all those banks and people. So in this case, it's an extremely important point.

etherium solves 0 of those problems so it’s a moot point

>> No need for proof of work or proof of stake

Yeah, I mean naked shorts and all.

1. Naked shorts are illegal except in very special circumstances for a market maker.

2. You don't need naked shorts for a stock to be >100% shorted.

We'd all have been better off if people took the GME frenzy as an opportunity to better understand how stock trades work, as opposed to an opportunity to reinforce their pre-existing misunderstanding.

Naked shorts are not possible with crypto unless I'm very mistaken. You could do it in some secondary market, but the blockchain AFAICT only works on "real" assets.

Which is irrelevant, we should judge things as they are and not as they "should be". Exchanges are part and parcel of the crypto ecosystem. We cannot ignore them in this discussion.

Naked shorts do exist in the crypto market and they do affect the prices of those currencies.

But of course why would anyone do that when there are a hundred easier ways to manipulate the crypto market? Buy a few influencers and UFC athletes to shill your crypto and you get a much better return on investment.

Naked shorts can and do exist on crypto exchanges

On an exchange, but not on a blockchain.

Exchanges are a convenience, and go against the entire concept of a distributed ledger. That part of what makes the whole thing a joke.

>.. a trusted environment ..

There is a term called circuit-breaker. How would it possible to trust a system if it has a "feature" called circuit-breaker ?

You could instead lose $625M to poorly written code [0]. Crypto is just rediscovering the reason we have financial regulations, at a higher speed.

https://crypto.news/axie-infinity-ronin-network-hack-625m-us...

Knight lost $400m due to a code bug in traffic.

Crypto proponents and libertarians taking issue with the rules of the capital markets is different than the system having no trust. The US capital markets are some of the most regulated, trusted markets in the world; it’s why capital flows into it (versus say, Russia, China, LATAM, etc). Some poorly written smart contract isn’t going to nuke their (potentially hundreds of millions of dollars) capital on a whim, and if there is an issue, there is a resolution path through industry, government, and the courts. That is “revealed trust” if you will.

Importantly, the belief of an individual can be drastically different than the consensus of market participants. Based on the capital allocation in US capital markets (tens of trillions of dollars), what does that signal regarding trust?

https://www.sifma.org/resources/research/fact-book/

what's wrong with having a circuit-breaker? My house has many and they come in handy. Same with the stock market, it helps slow down emotional trading and limit certain attacks.

There's no reasoning about (lack of) fundamentals or e-waste with crypto loyalists.

Just let it play out naturally: let the scammers scam, the gamblers gamble, the bag holders hold bags and the vanity coins go boom and bust. Can't do a thing about it; accepting this is much better for your sanity.

And well, all the electronics that are wasted on digital La-La land? It's a tell tale sign of the decadence of our times.

That too will come to an end, when earth finally forces us to get our priorities straight. It can only continue for so long...

> we should measure them in terms of tons of CO2, or perhaps its equivalent acres-of-the-Amazon-rainforest-lit-on-fire.

The marginal cost of a transaction is zero.

For example, if half the block was used, and half was completely empty, it would cost nothing extra to the environment to fill the empty half with random noise, NFTs, or Cryptokitty spam. Maybe long-term the storage, but nothing extra to mine that block like you're saying.

>> Instead of talking about these "gas fees" in terms of their monetary value, we should measure them in terms of tons of CO2, or perhaps its equivalent acres-of-the-Amazon-rainforest-lit-on-fire. I'm 100% serious.

We don’t do it with anything else, so why do it with this? Other than to virtue signal of course.

We do with tons of stuff? Articles have been written about CO2 costs for literally every aspect of life at this point.

That being said Proof of Work is a slightly different beast because the consumption of resources is the goal in and of itself. Efficiency gains are antithesis to it as the cost is what keeps the network safe.

When was the last time you read an article about the CO2 output of the finance industry?

I can first hand assure you there are a lot of very expensive CPU cores sitting in datacenters all over the world shuffling money back and forward for fractions of cents on the dollar.

huh? people talk about it all the time on this very site in the past. ALthough it's usually about how much VISA and mastercard uses, or how much is used by money flowing through the american banks.

Yes, but we don’t do it and ignore monetary value. We can and do discuss both.

Perhaps instead of all of these feel-good blaming the end user for systemic issues we could actually solve of the low hanging fruit surrounding climate change?

I'm tired of the blaming of regular people for not composting or recycling instead of the corporations who routinely behave poorly on a global scale.

Instead of CO2 generated by computers we could talk about CO2 generated by heavy industry? Which is actually a large emitter?

Or maybe we could talk about regulating corporate giants who routinely abuse environmental regulations by doing them in the 3rd world such as Conagra, Shell, or Dupont? These are companies which release untested chemicals and incentivize rainforest burning and yet we give them a free pass to focus on trivialities.

0.1 % of the world's energy is used by this, and growing. It is no longer ignorable.

And anyways most mining is inaccessible to regular people. It is gigantic corporations doing all the mining these days. Etherium runs mostly on AWS.

E: AWS claims that 25% of ETH workloads run on AWS

https://aws.amazon.com/blockchain/

> The industrial sector accounts for 30% of global emissions and roughly 37% of global energy consumption. This huge share of climate-changing emissions from one sector is an equally huge opportunity for emissions reduction on a global scale.

It's quite literally a rounding error. You're focusing on trivialities compared to actual polluters.

It doesn't really matter whether it's accessible to regular people. Container ships aren't exactly accessible to regular people either.

Eth most definitely doesn't run off AWS. Way too expensive lol.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/01/decarbonizing-heavy-i...

> Eth most definitely doesn't run off AWS. Way too expensive lol.

Then what are all of these Ethereum nodes doing on Amazon.com then? [0][1][2]

The evidence here satisfies the claim that >25% of ETH workloads are running on AWS. Worse than the original claim of just 25%.

Don't bother denying it.

[0] https://coinful.net/amazon-managed-blockchain-supports-ether...

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/03/announcin...

[2] https://ethernodes.org/networkType/Hosting

Replacing cryptocurrency can literally be done overnight. That's not true of international shipping.

Yes, it could, if you don’t account for the psychology of humans who might be caught in tragedy of the commons situations, stuck in local maxima, or simply have irrational thoughts across the board. That’s a big if though. For example, we have already “solved” global warming with the invention of nuclear power. The only thing holding us back is the psychology of people who thinks that using nuclear power is bad.

CO2 generated by Facebook and Amazon would be interesting to see. Worldwide computing usage too.

Fair point though: companies should be embargoed for wrecking the environment at this point. Even a handful of big western countries doing it would likely make waves, even without the US.

Is crypto mining heavy industry?

All those poor miners with black lung and cave-ins and such…

This 100% falls into the category of low hanging fruit. It's merely a far less efficient way of doing things we already know how to do. No worthwhile functionality would be lost.

Even if you think the main reason crypto is bad is the environmental damage I think it's probably more convincing to normal people to talk about how stupid it is ala these fees than to talk about the environmental damage.

>"All of this, over gifs, jpgs and fake land in a theoretically infinite digital universe that was probably procedurally generated anyway."

Sorry if this a naive question but what does "procedurally generated" mean here?

Implying low quality art-wise, probably. Borrowed from videogames industry, where Elden Ring reviews outperformed No Man's Sky, but not only because the latter had 2^64 different planets, one for each seed value, while the former had the world pretty much handcrafted. In fact there are good games with procedural generation, too.

The "world" is algorithmically generated, rather than being deliberately designed.

This is a temporary state of things due to proof of work. Proof of stake is coming, and already bored apes et al should be running on a Layer 2 like Polygon. Harping on the environmental consequences is a bit disingenuous.

Equating CO2 emission with Amazon-rainforest-lit-on-fire is deliberately inflammatory and grossly misleading.

If anything, higher atmospheric CO2 is probably locally better for the Amazon.

When's the President going to do something to fix these gas prices?

Anyway, I thought crypto currencies were meant to be inflation-proof.

Meh, we "waste" all sorts of energy, and what constitutes as waste is something to be debated and something that probably hits philosophical/ethical bedrock much like talking about, say, meat consumption.

When I eat meat, it nourishes me, and keeps me alive for a period of time. There are valid criticisms of the meat industry for sure, but generally speaking, meat keeps humans alive.

The power consumption of the crypto ecosystem is not comparable. The power consumption of the crypto ecosystem is sobering when you dig into the details.

Now, couple that with the very dubious value of the things built on top of that ecosystem, and this is not a "meh, just a little more waste" kind of conversation.

Your meat consumption is excessive to your needs and produces excess GHG. It is a want.

And that is why I mentioned there are valid criticisms of the industry.

I personally don't eat meat often, but that's not the point. The broader point is that meat, while wasteful, still provides clear value. That doesn't mean emissions aren't also a problem.

> The broader point is that meat, while wasteful, still provides clear value

What clear value compared to a less emitting alternative?

Meat has a history going back to the dawn of man as a primary source of sustenance. It's delicious, and thousands of millennia of evolution predisposes me to enjoy it more than less emitting alternatives.

The fact that meat has value is unrelated to the current state of the industry, which as I have said, is problematic.

The point I'm making is about the intrinsic value of the thing, because the GP wants to compare meat to cryptocurrency.

My point is that they're not comparable, regardless of the realities of mass produced meat and that industry's sustainability problems.

Dismissing issues with crypto as "meh, meat is a problem too" is a little bit like watching the Amazon burn down and concluding "meh, driving cars are a problem too".

Let's say I enjoy trading crypto. What puts that enjoyment as lesser to an equivalent amount of meat consumption that creates the same GHG emissions compared to alternative?

This time without appeal to the naturalism fallacy.

Admittedly not my greatest comment, and my point was lost in the shuffle. But since we're shifting the goalposts now and comparing activities to commodities, let's say the only meat I choose to eat is sourced by hunting wild game. Let's say I did the hunting myself with my own bow.

Will you at least acknowledge the value of meat as a basic form of sustenance?

Are you saying that trading crypto as a hobby (or crypto itself) is equivalent somehow?

> Will you at least acknowledge the value of meat as a basic form of sustenance?

Given that you can sustain yourself with alternatives that are less GHG emitting, you are basically trading GHG for your own personal satisfaction/enjoyment. How is that different from me trading an equivalent GHG to get some enjoyment out of my hypothetical crypto hobby?

> Are you saying that trading crypto as a hobby is equivalent somehow?

Both things that you only do because they make you happy and something you want, not something you need to survive.

What makes a unit of enjoyment gained from trading crypto somehow a less worthy preference than the unit of enjoyment gained from eating a steak rather than a plant-based alternative?

> Given that you can sustain yourself with alternatives that are less GHG emitting...

You and I can, sure, since I assume we're both having this conversation from our smartphones or computers and don't have to hunt for our food.

But again, that was not the point, nor was it the foundation of the question I asked.

If you're interested in having the same conversation, I'm happy to continue, but until then, I'm out. Ciao.

We're not talking about abstract metaphysics here. These are objectively measured metrics that correlate to direct physical impact on the planet.

Yes, so does meat eating. Nobody said anything about metaphysics, but whether something is wasteful is a normative question.

There is research demonstrating that the lowest-impact meat produces significantly more greenhouse gas than the worst, highest-impact vegetable. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216

If you're arguing that excess greenhouse gas emissions is not a waste product, then it seems like you're either embracing climate change or you know something about greenhouse gasses that nobody else knows.

> There is research demonstrating that the lowest-impact meat produces significantly more greenhouse gas than the worst, highest-impact vegetable. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216

Yes, that is my point.

> either embracing climate change

I'm making the very basic claim that all of these are based on normative facts, not metaphysics.

It is wasted. I can send you a JPG without using more energy than a EU resident will go through in several years. This isn't a philosophical or moral question. We have ownership models and financial systems that are flawed but at least on paper accountable to democracies and not mining consortiums.

Meat consumption is wasteful, sure, but at least the end product feeds humans. I don't get why we have to burn more energy than entire countries to power a speculative asset. Or buy contraband online.

even a vegan should see the value of the resulting nutritional calories from meat consumption, even if they tout alternatives.

I haven't yet been pointed at the value with regards to the thread topic (except in vague 'it's art!' kind of ways), even by extremely enthusiastic crypto-nuts -- so it makes the 'waste' w.r.t the thread topic a bit more egregious feeling, personally.

Well, a vegan and an honest meat eater would bring up trophic levels and needs vs. wants, though I don't want to get into that.

But I liken that incendiary debate to this one over who is "allowed" to waste energy and for what reason. It doesn't seem as simple of an argument as people in these comments suggest.

If I buy $100 of energy, what exactly am I allowed to do and not do with it? Can I not use all of it to power my vibrating butt plug? I think anyone who wants to go down the route should be ready for a much bigger conversation than the (seemingly) kneejerk, narrow-focused reaction lets on.

I mean, if the point of bringing up energy waste wrt crypto is to just marvel at the waste, then fine.

Let's say you have a friend who is always in debt. He knows it. You know it. Everyone you both know knows it.

He has a few friends, also deeply in debt, who try to pretend it's not an issue, but most people roll their eyes in frustration at that subgroup.

One day, your friend comes over in a brand new high-end Mercedes. You and all of their friends are appalled. Why on earth would they buy a Mercedes when they are already so far underwater that it's unclear if they'll ever be debt free.

To me, this is the problem with the crypto space. The world is full of problems that are threatening the planet. The world can't yet agree on how to solve those problems, (and some people pretend that problem doesn't even exist).

And along comes this new thing that consumes more energy than entire countries. And it's not really clear if it'll ever provide enough value to warrant the cost.

Yes, this will require some difficult conversations along the way, but people are quick to jump all over this because quite frankly, it's exactly the kind of problem the world doesn't need on top of the existing problems that still haven't been solved. There's a kind of exasperation that comes with the feeling.

When people bring up climate change, it's rarely just to marvel.

"Murder isn't a problem because people die all the time."

I don't think analogies are helpful, but if murder were rampant while we narrowly focused on the murders of a single subset group, mainly due to visibility reasons because they've only started murdering recently, then I would have the same problem with that inconsistency.

To reverse out of the analogy, we've decided that the solution is to simply illegalize murder, and it generalizes over any group doing any kind of murdering.

But what is the equivalent for energy waste? Illegalizing energy waste, for example, isn't quite as open-and-shut as murder.

Imagine how hard it would be to actually etch out the details (operationally, ethically) of an energy policy that generalizes over waste in the crypto space but also any other place we waste energy for things we don't actually need.

> Imagine how hard it would be to actually etch out the details (operationally, ethically) of an energy policy that generalizes over waste in the crypto space but also any other place we waste energy for things we don't actually need.

Does the fact that this is hard somehow make the problem go away? Yes, it will be hard. Like many factors contributing to climate change, changes are required that will make people unhappy.

The only question is whether humanity will take the steps to change on their own, or if the Earth will make those decisions for us.

It's also not necessary to implement an all-encompassing policy about every possible form of energy waste to take aim at emerging trends that are a clear threat to the climate.

Taking just one example, unwinding the problems with the meat industry is going to be incredibly difficult because of hundreds of years of precedent and expectations of the population. In that regard, focusing on curbing new threats first while still in their early stages sounds a lot more viable and at least in the short term, valuable.

> but if murder were rampant

I didn't say murder was rampant.

This comment is a good example of trolling. How did this get to the top of the thread?

> All of this, over gifs, jpgs and fake land in a theoretically infinite digital universe

No good faith here. Can we flag this?

> Instead of talking about these "gas fees" in terms of their monetary value, we should measure them in terms of tons of CO2, or perhaps its equivalent acres-of-the-Amazon-rainforest-lit-on-fire. I'm 100% serious.

I am so annoyed by this argument. The question we should be asking ourselves is how electricity is being generated in the first place. Fighting crypto is the wrong fight for environmentalists: the right fight is transitioning to healthier and cleaner source of energy in a world that will inevitably consume more and more electricity as part of our organic progress, with or without crypto.

If anything, use crypto and electric cars as a driver to enact these changes, not as blockers, since they drive more electric consumption and therefore they help making a stronger case for cleaner source of energy.

Cryptocurrency is worse than electric cars because cryptocurrency can be mined everywhere in the world, whereas electric cars require the use of the electrical grid near the location they're being driven. This means that local governments can mandate cleaner sources of energy and actually have an effect on electric cars, as you can't just import electricity from overseas as easily, while cryptocurrency mining can just move to more favorable jurisdictions in response to any inconvenient regulations. The incentives of cryptocurrency mining create a race to the bottom, where mining operations simply relocate around the world to wherever the regulations are laxest.

That’s like saying drunk drivers are actually lobbyists for funding more police sobriety checkpoints.

No. It's like saying that we need more food (and technology to produce it) to sustain an ever growing population, rather than saying we should mass-murder our population to bring it back within an acceptable boundary. This will bring investments, technology advancements, and trigger a race to generate energy in a better way.

We will always consume more energy (and food!) as our civilization progresses, I am embracing that without blocking that. Also, even without crypto we still need to find better energy sources anyways, so what's the pushback all about? We are just kicking the can down the road with no action other than "criminalizing" crypto.

While the low-effort statements stemming from the obsession with crypto carbon output annoy me as well, energy budget is an essentially zero-sum game (ignoring anomalous areas like those with net excess geothermal), and zero-carbon energy can be achieved by increasing 0C production or decreasing consumption.

As with almost every ecological issue, decreasing consumption is the more economically and logistically viable part of the solution, especially when it comes to cryptocurrency where the value-per-unit-energy is so many orders of magnitude lower than traditional systems.

I suggest scaling nuclear power all the way, while still innovating and investing in non-nuclear clean energy in the meantime.

The incentives don't match. No matter how efficient we make our power generation, PoW will simply scale up and consume more, making those gains moot. It will use up cheaper renewable energy and force everyone else to keep relying on fossil fuels. Of course I should not forget to mention the e waste which is a concern regardless of how much greenwashing is done

PoW will scale up to match, be vigilant about which sources it uses, which sources an enterpriser wants to try to use. Be vigilant about the coal plants coming online, while non-grid connected methane-reducing sources are applauded.

Large scale miners allowed this argument to get out of control because they didn't want people to know their sources of energy (extending their lead in front of other miners), and now this ESG boogeyman has taken an inaccurate life of its own.

At the end of the day, if you really think you have another economical use of energy because proof of work can't possibly be "it", then you still have to thank Proof of Work for making you notice an energy source and use case that everyone else failed to notice for decades.

I think PoW's incentives to grow are something that needs a lot of vigilance to curb, as it will be governments eventually using it in the most economical and polluting way, in order to control the network. But I think enough people can see through the "I just want any other thing to use energy waaah" argument that the private sector ban is never going to happen.

Aren't both things true from an environmentalists perspective?

1) We need to "transition[] to healthier and cleaner source of energy" 2) We need to use less energy overall

We do not produce enough clean energy to meet the total demand for energy. Until that is true, using less energy is a valid path to reducing the total impact of climate change.

You're assuming that the proponents of this argument are convinced that crypto is a worthwhile burn of energy in the first place, which is - off course - exactly the opposite of what's being implied.

Here's how your opponents see this exchange :

>> Instead of talking about <<<Burning skyscrapers for fun>>> in terms of their monetary value, we should measure them in terms of tons of CO2, or perhaps its equivalent acres-of-the-Amazon-rainforest-lit-on-fire. I'm 100% serious.

> I am so annoyed by this argument. The question we should be asking ourselves is how <<<Gasoline>>> is being generated in the first place. Fighting <<<Burning skyscrapers for fun>>> is the wrong fight for environmentalists: the right fight is transitioning to healthier and cleaner source of <<<Gasoline>>> in a world that will inevitably consume more and more <<<Petroleum>>> as part of our organic progress, with or without <<<Burning skyscrapers for fun>>>.

I replaced some words (marked by <<<.>>>) to make an analogy that will stand out to you and let you see how the other side uses the argument: they're not implying that enviromental disasters can be totally averted by banning crypto, they're simply stating that crypto is such a monumental waste of energy, the equivalent of burning skyscrapers for fun, that banning it will deprieve us of nothing valuable while saving up valuable time in our _continued_ fight for the enviroment. If you're stuck in the desert with limited water, you search for more water *and* punish those who waste existing water. The more extravagant the waste and far away the alternative sources, the more you should divide your attention between finding new sources and punishing those who waste.

I'm personally moderately on the anti-crypto side (just barely, and very reluctantly) in this, distributed trustless blockchains is a A)Theoretically beautiful B)But extremly, hugely, unimaginably inefficient-in-practice idea that only kinda sorta work when you use it for what plain old bitcoin was used for in the early days and only under extreme circumstances (e.g. circumventing governoment censorship). It's like communism (ironic given the stereotypical libertarianism of it's proponents), it's beautiful that somebody thought of this as an alternative to what we currently do and it's fascinating to imagine what we can do with it. But it's just not ready, maybe a better humanity in a better time and place could make it work, but not here and not now. Rushing not-ready things into production then "fixing it later" is how you do hacky scripts and shitty CRUD apps, not economic and financial systems.

The reason I also hate anti-crypto discourse is the extreme religiousness (almost of the same caliber as the fanatically pro-crypto side) that people treat this matter with, no amount of anger and insults will make reasonable pro-crypto people see the error of their ways, and unreasonable folks will not listen to the fiery screeds in the first place, so all this screaming going back and forth is for nothing.