I, for one, am happy that enabling art theft and fraud on a massive scale will shortly no longer ALSO consume terrifying amounts of electricity and hardware, but that is about as positive as I can be about this news.
Where did I say it was the only problem? Why are you strawmaning my comment with such anger?
> ands acting as if solving this one problem should silence all dissenters lest they be considered unserious is disingenuous.
Another strawman and this rhetoric sounds like defeat and denial and my point was (if you've properly read my comment instead of misconstruing it) as soon as it moves to proof-of-stake, there will be no argument on the environmental issues in Ethereum, which was regularly parroted by the critics.
> Look at the comments for literally any popular article about crypto on this site, hell, keep scrolling on this one and you'll probably find plenty.
Look at what? I see no comments about the environmental issues in Ethereum anymore, which proves my point. I already recognise that there are scams, ponzis, etc happening in Ethereum which the regulators will step in and crackdown on them anyway.
> I, for one, am happy that enabling art theft and fraud on a massive scale will shortly no longer ALSO consume terrifying amounts of electricity and hardware
Exactly. All the fraud and scams are visible on a public blockchain which is easily traceable for everyone including the SEC, CFTC and the FBI to see.
Also, it's kind of a weird stance to take? I haven't seen anyone claiming that PoS wouldn't do exactly what it set out to do, that is fix the energy waste issue inherent in PoW-based blockchains. Maybe we just run in different circles, but the main criticism I see of PoS is that it doesn't _matter._ It doesn't make blockchains or defi any more useful or moral, and it just highlights the other externalities more clearly.
I was totally and exactly clear about what I meant about "Inventing new problems" after Ethereum moving to proof-of-stake.
One can move to proof-of-stake, reduce or eliminate the significant environmental issues in their chains whilst also increase centralization which is another major valid criticism brought up after the upgrade to PoS widely discussed here. Like I said before, I don't see anyone here discussing how Ethereum moving to PoS is worse for the environment than PoW and I consider the environmental issues of Ethereum brought up by many critics answered and it will no longer be an issue.
You can still be anti-crypto and welcome this [0] (or not) and still criticise it on the centralization, scams and ponzi enablement and alledged limited use cases etc. But not for the environmental issues, or 'burning up the planet', etc on Ethereum.
> Also, it's kind of a weird stance to take? I haven't seen anyone claiming that PoS wouldn't do exactly what it set out to do, that is fix the energy waste issue inherent in PoW-based blockchains.
I did not make that claim.
> the main criticism I see of PoS is that it doesn't _matter._ It doesn't make blockchains or defi any more useful or moral, and it just highlights the other externalities more clearly.
Right, unfortunately Ethereum or the wider crypto ecosystem in general isn't going to go away that easily. But I know it certainly will be more regulated with a few surviving blockchains.
The same argument could be made of all scarce assets that rocketed in price in the past years. Watches, the stock market, and real estate don't inherently "centralize wealth". Their price appreciation was only a symptom of the reduced cost of debt, which naturally favors the wealthiest, which reflects in the price of what wealthy people buy when they have too much money (scarce assets).
The base concept of cryptocurrency is enabling free market economies by bypassing government regulation, and at least in the case of Bitcoin and Ethereum, regulating inflation by setting it in code, instead of being opaquely decided by a few wealthy people (some of them convicted of insider-trading[1]). Those two things tend to favor bottom-up wealth creation, rather than the trickle-down model fiat currencies encourage. That's a wealth decentralization force, not centralization like you claim.
[1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/a-timeline-of-the-federal-res...
In principle, inflationary currencies have a force pushing away from wealth centralization, while deflationary currencies have a force pushing towards it, which is why everyone who thinks they'll have the centralized wealth likes deflationary currencies.
That depends entirely where the new money gets injected. If it gets injected at the top, like with our current fiat currencies, then there's nothing wealth-decentralizing about it, all the contrary. [1]
Mineable cryptocurrencies inject the new money to whoever mines them, which could be anyone (less true with the current state of Proof of Work, but still true in the case of Proof of Space), thus the wealth-centralizing mechanism of fiat inflation is removed or at least mitigated.
[1]: https://www.swfinstitute.org/news/89070/what-is-the-cantillo...
While true in theory, is it true in practice? Those with the most resources to mine will mine the most and thus receive the most, allowing them to mine more, and the cycle of centralization continues.
That's true regardless of PoW or PoS, isn't it?
> Those with the most resources to mine will mine the most and thus receive the most, allowing them to mine more, and the cycle of centralization continues.
This is not a problem if the reward distribution is proportional to the investment from miners, which happens when the mining competition has low or inverse economies of scale, and a low barrier to entry.
In PoW and Bitcoin especially, the economies of scale are huge. "Industrial" miners are greatly more profitable than home miners, and ASICs require an upfront investment which comes with risk that smaller operations might not want to take. The result of this high barrier to entry and economies of scale are empirically verifiable by looking at the hash rate from block wins.
A correctly designed PoS system almost completely removes economies of scale (notice I said correctly designed, because many other PoS cryptocurrencies actually explicitly favor larger stakes), but might add some artificial barrier to entry, like Ethereum's 32 ETH minimum. The wealth centralization effect is also amplified in PoS by how directly acquiring the scarce resource required to participate in the competition influences the value of existing stakers' investment.
In Proof of Space consensus protocols (PoST) [1], the scarce resource is storage space. This can have minimal or even inverse economies of scales relative to money invested, as the running costs become almost as minimal as a PoS operation. And since the quality of the storage material is also irrelevant, what matters most is the cost per Tb of acquisition of storage space. The best savings are done on second hand drives, which makes investment in free time rather than money the profit differentiator. The free time to wealth ratio scales inversely, so smaller PoST miners can have a proportional advantage over larger ones. This decentralization effect is empirically verifiable with how much more individual mining nodes the biggest PoST cryptocurrency Chia currently has than Bitcoin and Ethereum, despite the comparatively very low absolute amount of rewards its consensus delivers to its miners.
[1]: full name: Proof of Space and Time, with Time referring to a competition required to get reliable timestamps on the blockchain happening in parallel to the competition over Space.
I know precisely that I see the same old arguments against crypto time after time, but somehow despite all of these scams, carnage, etc. it still refuses to die somehow.
Maybe companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Stripe, Monegram, and even the regulators want it to succeed? If not, they would have banned all the exchanges, coins, and removed all wallets off of the apps stores a long time ago.
So I'm afraid that it is here to stay, with some survivors existing for a long time under certain compliance requirements and other crypto projects withering away.
But, at least to me, this will make ethereum-based NFTs of interesting art a more morally-justifiable purchase.
All the average person knows is that there were a bunch of Super Bowl commercials about “crypto”, and their cousin who spends a lot of time on the computer lost a lot of his parents money investing in a thing called “Bitcoin” last year.
Just saying :)
And I really suspect that Ethereum will win the race anyway. At least until something really juicy appears (like private contracts, chain-managed secrets, etc).
At least now it has a hard deadline which will silence the parroting critics on 'burning up the planet', 'The merge will NEVER happen', 'repeated delays', etc.
But I imagine that they will invent new problems and the critics will hastefully rush in with their low effort hot takes. The crypto supporters also need to hold their horses a bit on their claims of this 'taking over the current system' which is extremely unlikely to happen.
Which ever side or view you are on in regards to crypto, The Merge seems to be undeniably a great spectacle of software architecture and this event has gone through a very regimented process and checks in upgrading components that handle billions of dollars worth of money.
I await to see what happens next.