> 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.