Finland consumes about 87 TWh of electricity every year.
An entire Finland of electricity use thinly distributed over the entire planet disappearing is a negligible rounding error on the grand scheme of things. It's about a ~0.3% change.
News media uses word imagery like "an entire Finland of electricity use" because it sounds huge and scary to the average person who doesn't understand that absolute numbers are meaningless out of context. Zooming out, you realize that while Finland is big from an individual human scale, it barely exists in the wider cacophony of human civilization.
And that's just looking at electricity, which is a percentage total human energy use. Much more energy use comes from transportation, industry, and heating, which is much more carbon intensive than electricity generation, since much of our electricity comes from hydro, nuclear, and increasingly solar and wind.
If I and my grandma and everyone's grandma would use Proof of Work cryptocurrencies to buy peanuts at the supermarket, PoW energy usage would probably rival that of China.
Now it's just used for speculation by a bunch of rich folks, crooks and marks. Probably only a few thousand transactions per second, I imagine.
I can't speak for all PoW cryptocurrencies, but this is a common misunderstanding about Bitcoin. Energy usage does not scale with the number of users. The transactions per second is largely fixed due to the block size limit. If your grandma is using Bitcoin, she will probably be transacting on a second layer, e.g. Lightning or Coinbase.
If the transfer was not done on a blockchain but only in the database of some company, are you really using any new technology?
I think what you want to discuss when using these words is the extent to which it is either likely or possible that a small number of players can unduly influence a thing, but there are frequently MANY MORE FACTORS at work here than "that number." You have to look at how the thing is set up, what governance looks like, what technical limitations there are, and -- perhaps most importantly -- what incentives are there in place for the players to do so.
A lot of the "centralization" fears are bad because they're the sort of thing, that -- if executed -- would destroy the value of the thing to the centralizers themselves, and thus they would literally never do it.
You cannot have decentralized money without distributed wealth that is not concentrated . This usually means a successful form of socialism ( none have proven successful, or looks likely to do so today)
This merge to PoS is just exposing that people with wealth always have a say on how the system works, whether it is miners or stakers it was and is always controlled by few .
Miners nor stakers can decide how the system works, Ethereum does not have on-chain governance. 51% of miners/stakers can't just post invalid blocks crediting them with free money nor can they force anyone else's wallet to do anything that wasn't signed by the private key. The worst you can really do is refuse to include transactions in your blocks for as long as you are controlling the network, all it takes is one honest actor to include your transaction and it will finalize.
[1] Sustainable does not mean good or that I (or any else) condone it, just that it can work and survive .
[2] That is the number to make it comparable to modern American Econo-political system that has survived largely intact in pretty much same form from the early years of the revolution. Historically feudal monarchies or other systems like the Tokugawa Shogunate had survived much longer for variety of reasons however that are difficult to compare in the modern techno Geo-political era .
They're brown and 'marginalized' and occupy a small slice of Mexico. You and I may know about them because we probably monitor anarchist/leftist circles. I'm quite anti-socialist myself but I readily admit the Zapitistas have proven 'successful' about as well as they could hope for their situation. But few outside of a few circles wants to acknowledge it as it goes against the conventional thought that democratic or pseudodemocratic society can be trumped by a bunch of fucking 'backwater' community-focused brown people with guns and their own prerogative, who don't fit the mold of the typical example that when society 'breaks down' it must be taken over by savage worlords or drug barons.
You can guarantee if there were a story of a bunch of American rednecks even trying to pull off anything similar it'd be downvoted to hell here and nearly universally hated by American society. Soccer moms everywhere would clap to their execution by the National Guard. Some ATF-esque character would stand over the rubble for photographs like they did over the char of the dead kids at Waco and the public would eat it up.
Admitting the Zapatistas are a 'success' challenges a lot of people's philosophies and assumptions. Hell it even admits some of my own were wrong. This can be difficult to reconcile. It's not surprising that answers to your question are not exactly forthcoming.
(Side note: my definition of "success" for socialism is fairly modest: to be sustainable long term economically, and to preserve personal freedoms at least to the same degree that modern capitalist liberal democracies have. That's the only way I see it as a meaningful alternative to the status quo.)
There's also Rojava to consider, and it's perhaps somewhat more widely known because it was covered somewhat during the Western press' fascination with ISIS and war with them. These guys are perhaps more interesting than the Zapatistas long term because they're doing it in a somewhat more urbanized & industrialized area with 10x population, and they are explicitly designing a governance framework with intent to scale to nation-state size and beyond. But, well, it hasn't even been 10 years yet, so I don't think it counts as solid evidence of anything just yet.
They talk a big talk about socialism but honestly I wasn't seeing it in the cities like Qamishlo. Full of capitalist street vendors and the like, and poverty on the outskirts. Honestly they seemed pretty vanilla capitalist outside the 'mustache-jesus' (Apo) talk you see in YPG, etc. I do recall free bread/naan line on the street.
In the firmly 'Rojava' 'owned' cities like Deyrik the general structure of the people and markets reminded me quite a bit of Barzani controlled KRG. Of course, I spent most my time with the militia and not civil life, so I'm sure there's lots I missed. I think many of the 'true believers' in the old Kurdish socialist causes probably migrated more to the Iraqi Mountains, sadly those people are getting pounded on by the Turks.
Also, the most recent iteration of the social contract that I have - one from 2016 - has these bits in it:
"There shall be a right to invest in private projects which, while taking account of environmental balance, provide the services necessary for economic development, respond to the needs of society and help to stimulate economic activity in the community.
The right to private property shall be safeguarded in such a way as not to conflict with the public interest, and it shall be regulated by law."
Now this is all rather vague, but it doesn't read like a hardline stance against any hint of capitalism. And given the bottom-up political system, so long as democratic institutions work as declared, it seems that individual municipalities should be able dial the balance as they see fit. From what I heard, while PYD enjoys broad popular support, that doesn't necessarily translate to specific policies they advocate for. So perhaps it's basically as socialist as people actually want it to be at the moment?
Which would make it even more important. While the economics of it is interesting by itself, I think the key part of the experiment is decentralized council democracy. That should be enough to give people actual voice on matters that concern them, as opposed to the sham that representative republics inevitably end up at scale. Once communities actually have control over their commons, they can figure out the economics according to their needs and preferences.
But, again, this is assuming that their governance model is as advertised and can persist in the long term. What was your impression on the ground?
I didn't spend a lot of time in civil life. I saw no large businesses. I saw these in KRG Iraq (even big dealerships, like for farm equipment) but not in Rojava. Basically all the businesses I noticed in urban areas were what I describe as roughly family-unit sized operations run in your typical middle eastern stall. Perhaps a hardware store or something was a bit larger. The biggest 'business' I saw was vehicle repair shop with 4 or 5 stations and that was run by YPG. In civil city such a repair shop would basically be a single booth with the storage-shed style big room and they probably worked on the car while it was outside. I never saw something large-businesses esque like the kind of supermarkets you may see deep in latin America. I also did not notice much presence of 'government operated' retail business and if that was happening for anything other than bread, it was invisible to me (PYD/YPG does run some co-ops, like agriculture and textiles related stuff).
I have no idea how the farms were run. It's possible these were run by the state. The farmers are very dedicated, they gave no fuck and just kept going while active shelling/fighting was happening proximally. It is possible as I mentioned above to get bread for free in the cities. You just walk up and ask for it (of course, you could ask practically anyone for food anywhere, they would probably give you some). No money was seen changing hands, but that is at specific stalls. I do think whatever their food distribution system is, it seemed to be working better than in ISIL controlled territory -- when we took over one village people were begging in a desperate way and fighting over the little food our people were able to give. I never saw such desperation in Rojava proper (lots of beggars in Rojava, but for money not food).
Overall I did not find many devout followers of some particular brand of political writings, although I'm sure some politicians are, but I'm not much a politician myself :) A few 'Westerners' joined the Kurds with extreme political views, but anecdotally I found those people were not very well liked. I have my doubts whether the average people even give a fuck about whatever the PYD or people in charge think. The Kurds have a long history and most of that doesn't include Apo's (Ocalan's) brand of socialism, although they would surely view him highly charitably. There may be significantly different opinions in (the tip of) Northern Iraq where the hardcore socialist elements hold more sway. Then again, given the temperament of the Kurdish people I think it would be hard to impose any sort of anything on them.
I would wager as long as you don't perform some egregious crime you could get away with a lot in Rojava without the government imposing their will on you. I visited a prison and some petty criminals escaped as I was there, the reaction of the guards was just kind of 'meh' as they got away. I do not think the government has the strength to fight their existential threats while simultaneously enforcing any strong form of socialism on the populace, although doing so on a large business would be easy enough as they'd be a big centralized target.
The main attractions I would describe to Rojava are pretty extreme freedom (minimal government, you can have guns, you seem to be able to run a business pretty openly without much fanfare, by middle east standards extremely liberal view on religion, booze is sold openly, people are open and friendly and helpful, personal rights like privacy and ownership appear to be well respected, etc). If I were looking for a socialist utopia, or anything near approximating it, I would not go there.
If I could describe Kurds, I'd call them Americans of the middle east. Instead of America's de facto religion of Christianity, their 'religion' is Apo (Ocalan, the socialist). But like America, the average person seems to be not much a practitioner and Apo is more of a symbol like the cross so many people hang as much for cultural reasons as anything else. Nevertheless their culture is incredibly hospitable, so perhaps their brand of socialism can better described as just being a good neighbor and not the government putting a foot up your ass to redistribute your wealth.
Powered through high tax rates and foreigners who want to work instead of the people sitting on benefits, but it works.
Edit: Sorry folks, that claim was based on outdated data! The latest figures for both Visa and Mastercard are ~5,000 transactions per second each.
This article claims Mastercard alone is 5k: https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-lightning-network-vs-...
Visa says they process "150 million transactions every day in 175 currencies" (see page 3 at https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visan...). That's ~1,800 per second. Mastercard is smaller, so this would be the upper limit for them. Both combined should still fit into "a few thousand transactions per second".
[1] https://annualreport.visa.com/financials/default.aspx
[2] https://s25.q4cdn.com/479285134/files/doc_financials/2022/q2...
[1] Yes these systems are complex and very distributed and have lot of checks and balances and the actual transactions apps and DBs are running on infra in hundreds or thousands of servers in DCs all around the world.
Maybe around Christmas it will be in the 10k+
Slow settlement and reversible transactions are a boon for buyers (and for fraudsters abusing chargebacks to get free stuff). For sellers they're a bit of a nightmare since you never know when money you thought you had been payed in good faith might disappear from your accounts with little or no recourse.
For crypto I was trying to be super generous, I know they're incredibly slow.
A large coffee shop chain would crush any supermarket in volume.
Do you have any information or just speculation?
Things I'm curious about:
- Where'd you learn this?
- Have you read any academic material about Bitcoin? (eg: Bitcoin white paper, etc)
- Why did you post five times on a thread about something you know very little about?
Edit: it concerns me that people are so passionately posting misinformation on this post.
so it's not usage that scales energy consumption, it's value of btc. Arguably though the two are intrinsically related (this should be obvious - if bitcoin somehow becomes the defacto global currency, a shitload of investment will pour in and bring its value much much higher)
in truth it's a moot point. even with lightning protocol, bitcoin as a protocol couldn't handle that much capacity. If a few hundred million people just wanted to publish a single transaction (putting money in a wallet and thereafter doing everything on lightning protocol), it would take literally years to process that many transactions.
Edit: just to be explicit, the reason energy consumption scales with block reward value is because it becomes very profitable to buy more mining equipment and mine more if the reward say doubles. It’s not an instant effect of course because there’s capital acquisition and operational capacity involved
It's incredibly difficult to find the truth from either side, especially if you're a lay person who doesn't have any grasp of how the technology works.
Experiments on social systems, currencies and stores of value should start small and work their way up OVER DECADES to tens and hundreds of thousands of people.
Experimental stuff put into production, like Communism, can bring suffering for decades, if not centuries, to tens and hundreds of millions of people... billions, even.
So if the proponents want to revolutionize the system immediately for a 5% efficiency improvement, especially since many of them have so MUCH MONEY AND POWER to gain from this revolution, be very, very SKEPTICAL.
Frankly their odds to not be grifters or (smart) idiots are minuscule.
Beyond your misconception that work scales with users rather than value, it's also a misconception that bitcoin is competing with technologies like Visa and Paypal. It's not supposed to be an alternative payment system.
It's competing with gold and sovereign currencies.
Your grandma won't ever use it directly.
Your government might.
You don't understand how any of this works, do you?
Good try, but trite criticism regarding crypto is required to include the words "Ponzi" and "tulips".
Let's try nuanced criticism please, crypto needs it.
> Probably only a few thousand transactions per second, I imagine
Quite an imagination! You're very far off, do you have any experience in this space?
Thank you, I'm trying to come up with an "anti bullshit bingo" since the bullshit bingo from cryptocurrencies has already managed to raise tens of billions of dollars. Glad you like it.
> Quite an imagination! You're very far off, do you have any experience in this space?
I was trying to be generous since crypto supporters always like to point to the newest barely working bleeding edge centralized "layer" called lightning or thunderbolt or some other electricity derived thing, which is supposed to greatly accelerate the glacial rate of crypto transactions.
Again, can I use crypto of any kind to buy $2 peanuts at the supermarket in Bucharest and grandma $1 popcorn at the cinema in Djibouti, without turning Earth into Venus?
Probably not, but you can neither use USD (or any sort of dollar) for that either. In Bucharest you'd use Romanian leu (RON) and in Djibouti you'd use Djiboutian franc (DJF).
It's all about finding people in the middle, to agree on what you both have. In this case, you wouldn't be able to buy anything in those locations.
Sure, I'm not paying dollars necessarily, but that's how it's treated on my side. But I never used my ccs in person overseas yet
Nothing crypto specifically solves as a user.
> Nothing specifically solved
Besides permissionless transactions? Does your credit card offer those?
Do you pay monthly fees for the privilege of not paying fees on foreign transactions? I do :(
Which single currency satisfies the GP's description?
No fees on any credit cards I keep, except 1 which was waived this year when i called to change it to a free card.
If irreversible transactions worry you, use an intermediary; the way you already use credit instead of cash (which requires no permissions).
Any single currency?
With the media tactics out of the picture, you don't think this is a huge amount of electricity for crypto alone to have been using? Seriously? 0.3% of global electricity use is ABSOLUTELY HUGE.
I know this isn't you, many people use these units, but I cringe every time I see abuse of units like this. 1 TWh/year is 113MW, so you are saying 2.8TW global; Finland is 9.4GW.
No, because of two reasons. First, many miners simply pointed their hardware to mine other cryptocurrencies such as ETHW or ETC. For example we have evidence that about a quarter of Ethereum's mining farms moved to ETC over the last 24h. Second, contrary to sensationalist headlines Ethereum miners only represent a drop in the bucket of the global electricity consumption: only 0.1%. Yes that can be a "country's worth of electricity" but in relative terms, 0.1% would be barely visible on charts you might examine.
Also, digiconomist, an often quoted source of Ethereum miner's energy consumption statistics, was grossly overestimating the figures. The actual consumption was probably around 20-30 TWh/year instead of the ~80 TWh/year figure they estimated. Just look at their chart: it made no sense, for example between Sep 2020 and May 2022 Ethereum hashrate grew 5-fold from 200 to 1000 TH/s, whereas in that same time-frame digiconomist estimated the consumption grew 15-fold from 6 TWh/year to 90 TWh/year. If anything, hardware has become (a bit) more efficient over time, it didn't become 3 times less efficient...
But that's not too surprising, given the author of digiconomist has a history of exaggerating his figures, like he did for Bitcoin see https://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci/ But nowadays his Bitcoin estimate is more in-line with more reputable estimates such as Cambridge's https://cbeci.org/ Last time I looked he was within ±30%
1 out of every 1000 watts of energy produced in the whole world going to ethereum mining is tragic. It’s an absolutely massive waste, and the fact that crypto miners think a number like that isn’t a big deal is horrifying to me.
Logically, you should be 660 times more "horrified" by this waste than by cryto mining, and yet you are not. In fact most likely until today you were not even aware of such waste. This is what bothers me the most about these discussions. People have priorities in the wrong places. You want to show you care about waste? Then start caring about the most important problems instead of being laser-focusing on 0.1%.
Would it be great if solar panels and wind turbines and nuclear reactors converted 100% of the heat/light/wind energy into useful electricity? Sure. But that's also not something we have the technology to achieve, and likely never will. People are constantly researching ways to improve power plants, but they will never reach 100% efficiency.
What we _do_ have the technology to achieve, however, is turning off things which use a ton of energy but provide no value. Saving 1‰ of earth's global electricity consumption just by turning off a useless gambling toy is a huge win, and the fact that it was allowed to use 1‰ of our global energy use in the first place is horrifying.
But this 1 in 1000 watts going to ethereum mining is entirely useless, contributing nothing to society except a Ponzi scheme that, like most Silicon Valley bullshit, only exists because regulations haven’t caught up yet. I don’t care that 1 in 1000 watts is a small number. The wattage going to Finland actually gives tens of millions of people electricity to live their lives. Crypto mining is just tech bros playing with funny money, robbing people of real money in the process.
Firstly they aren't inherent. Losses can be minimized. But you don't seem to care, even though losses account for orders of magnitude more energy waste than mining. Your position is illogical.
Secondly, this isn't only about transmission losses. The link explains, for example, that some of this waste comes from incandescent light bulbs that waste 90% of electricity as heat. Again, logically you should be "horrified" by this, but you aren't because media doesn't write click-baity articles about incandescent light bulbs "boiling oceans".
“Can be minimized” and “Inherent” are not antonyms. It can be both. And yes, I care.
> some of this waste comes from incandescent light bulbs that waste 90% of electricity as heat. Again, logically you should be "horrified" by this
I am. Every reasonable human being would look at incandescent light bulbs and say “yes, those are wasteful”. Because a reasonable alternative exists, and if you’re still burning incandescent light bulbs, you’re being wasteful.
PoW cryptocurrency however, is a system that is designed to be wasteful, and if the crypto bros had their way, we’d do all transactions this way. When an obvious alternative exists: Don’t fucking use cryptocurrency. Crypto solves zero problems, has zero benefits, and wastes electricity. The faster we abandon it, the better for literally everyone.
We'll see if this is maintainable.
Miners can't mine if the reward doesn't cover their costs. So, the only way the mining remains sustainable is if these tokens rise drastically in value.
It is possible that many miners are huge holders of ETH, in which case we may see them massively dump ETH and buy ETC to try to invert the price and keep their business going.
...which is a stop-gap, holding-pattern sort of action to take, because there is OpEx to running a mining farm, and the lower trading value of ETC vs ETH (1 ETC = 0.025ETH) means ETC block rewards likely won't be enough to be positive-margin for these farmers. This is just a way to reduce burn while they try to sell their rigs. (Which they likely won't be able to do, because nobody wants overheated near-EOL mining GPUs. Mining farms will likely just end up bankrupt with assets liquidated at fire-sale prices.)
https://minerstat.com/coin/ETC/network-hashrate
And here is the ETHW hashrate:
https://minerstat.com/coin/ETHW/network-hashrate
EDIT: Better links
The question if it is visible in the electricity generation numbers is still very relevant. (If it is, we will probably only be able to see it in an year, when international organizations compile their numbers.)
Whoever was using this electronics switched to other BTC variants, but in long term this reduced profitability and should harm people using energy in this way.
But sadly no immediate impact, unless there are electronics that could be profitably consuming power for Ethereum and it is not profitable for alternatives.
It's also true that there are second order effects, like for example all the mining hardware dedicated to ETH needs to find a new home, which will depress prices for new mining hardware for "chains that are hardware-compatible with old ETH", and thus probably support their prices a bit.
[1] And do, I think. IIRC there was a stat rolling around a few months back showing electrical grid usage dropping due to the crypto crash, but can't remember where it was or how reliable the source seemed.
[2] Though AFAICT no one is tracking exchange rates for it yet, so your guess is as good as mine as to its value.
This is a bit trickier. If they have equipment already then it changes situation.
Cost of computing hashes includes mostly energy and hardware.
As long as it can pay for operating costs, they will continue to do this, even if buying electronics for that is no longer profitable
(unless selling equipment is more profitable)
https://minerstat.com/coin/ETC/network-hashrate and https://minerstat.com/coin/ETC/difficulty
A blockchain compatible with old ETH is old ETH... the classic one.
That's like saying a stock price is directly proportional to the p/e ratio. Things have both intrinsic and extrinsic value. You are only considering the intrinsic value. In reality, people mine stuff at a loss all the time because they think it might be work more later, i.e. speculation.
I don't think that's a solid argument. Some coins were structured such that there would be a finite supply (21M in the case of bitcoin IIRC). The health of a coin seems to me to be its transaction volume, and somewhat related its ability to be directly exchanged for physical goods or services.
So back to a previous user's suggestion: instead of buying energy to mine coins at a loss, one could instead buy the coins at a lower price which seems on many levels to make more sense than to continue mining.
Exactly! Which is why we expect the energy expended on mining PoWETH to drop to zero as the coin dies due to lack of interest, which was the upthread point you were arguing against.
It's possible to justify reasons to continue. Bad reasons. But how many miners care?
No, mining is economic activity, not investment. You pay stuff to get stuff. Whether you then invest your profits in crypto has nothing to do with where you got them.
They are not the same concept, in fact they're completely orthogonal. You don't mine to get coins for investment, because you can get coins much (MUCH!) more cheaply via other means. You mine to get income in the present.
Overpaying for an investment doesn't make it NOT an investment. You're just saying that arbitrarily.
There is a new PoW fork that was started by miners that want to continue mining. Some of the work could go there assuming it doesn't tank. I personally don't see the utility though, doubt it will be able to attract many users.
Although irc you need to use a cpu, not a gpu to mine it.
It looks like it's already happening. After the merge there were a number of coins that saw huge spikes in hash rate which drove them to absolutely unprofitable levels. A lot of that hash rate has since gone elsewhere (most likely offline) and it looks like many coins are settling at a level in the short term that is breakeven at $0.06-0.08 kWh which many (most?) miners can't be profitable at as that is below their electric rate.
https://amycastor.com/2022/09/11/crypto-collapse-celsius-voy...
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2022/08/11/crypto-colla...
As they thrash around in bankruptcy, they have proposed that they will mine their way out of the hole. Will this work? I doubt it. But will it let the CEO stay in charge for a while longer, taking in more investor money and continuing to get paid? Possibly! So actual economic efficiency may not matter.
Those pile of GPU are going to be a write off since prices are dropping and supply issue improves as well.
I don't keep up with crypto and mining but until it becomes unprofitable or you can't pull money for and start operating in the red, you're going to continue consuming similar power.
Crypto mining occurs mainly where electricity is either cheap or free. Hydroelectric and Geothermal tends to produce the cheapest energy so many large mining outfits were relocated next to Hydroelectric and Geothermal plants. Many are in remote northern areas where computer cooling costs are less expensive too. $HIVE blockchain technologies was running enough ethereum miners to mine 7675 ethereum ($11.5 Million dollars worth) during the 3 month period ending in June 30, 2022 according to their quarterly earnings report. 100% of all of their miners used renewable energy sources.
One thing that I find interesting in the electricity debates is that if we took the gaming example and looked at the collective consumption of all people playing video games around the world, you'd arrive at even larger numbers of power usage and emissions. Yet this isn't ever discussed, even though an immutable public ledger like Bitcoin arguably has more utility for society than playing games. A lot of HN users probably play video games, CO2 emissions are of course mainly an issue caused by other people and activities oneself doesn't take part in. In Europe, there's also a trend of public anger against SUVs and there are groups slashing tires of cars, simply based on the shape and ignoring the actual energy efficiency. Happened to a friend of mine who couldn't understand why they targeted her car and left 30 year old gas guzzlers in the same street alone. I think a lot of it has to do with emotions more than rational considerations around sustainability.
Okay, this is the second time I've seen an argument of the form: If you're not okay with the energy consumption of PoW cryptocurrencies, you can't be okay with X.
The first time I called it out, was someone pointing at the energy consumption of making, transporting, and storing ice cream. You are bringing up gaming.
You are advocating for making our children's/descendants lives worse, our lives worse, and trying to throw a valuable industrial subsidizer of the state of the art in many sub-fields of computer science...
...to defend the least efficient, wasteful,least empowering form of computation we've ever discovered. You're taking and making hostages of something that has objectively wrought joy and innovation to millions of lives.
If you find yourself on one side of an argument, and ice cream/video games on the other... I'd recommend having a long hard think about how you managed to get there.
If it's a hybrid SUV then it's more complicated, but a gas SUV makes sense as a target even with an engine tuned for efficiency.
Video games' secondary impacts to simulation, film making, and modeling have and will provide more benefit per energy used than any proof of work system ever will.
All to supposedly create artificial scarcity for .jpg files.
At least that illness is over now somewhat. Hopefully all the miners go bankrupt.
Which ones we looking for?
No, because ETH mining is/was quite distributed globally, let's say across thousands and thousands of power grids. A single grid or power station shouldn't be able to notice the difference.
Think about it this way: all of a sudden, domestic fridges consume 1/100th of electricity, compared to before.
Fridges are 0.1% of average power consumption. Thousands of fridges in a given area are powered by the same power station. The power station barely notices the ~0.1% reduction in power consumption, compared to the day before. Shrugs.
Not likely. We'rein an energy crisis and it just started getting cold. So, the opposite.
I just hope the PoW markets collapse now ETH is moving on.
How is it good for the environment? I only mine when my house and battery does not need electricity and our solar is producing over 1kw. Everything I earn (around 100-300$ a month between February to Oktober) I invest in the next environment project. My miners need about 500w. This is a fraction of the amount I put back into the grid. If I would not do this, our new heating system wouldn't be financed yet.
There's a case to be made for using the spikes of solar power to run miners, on a grid dominated by renewables, but that requires the economics to work out just right with very cheap silicon that can sit idle a big majority of the time.
It would be nice, if this would be mandatory for big official mining operations. Pretty sure they would just move somewhere else but still.
Mining takes energy that is likely created by fossil fuel, that would otherwise be used to some necessary purposes, and burns it.
Unless you are generating green energy yourself, you’re likely hurting the environment.
I’m not saying you need to stop, and I’m not saying mining rigs are the end of the world (lord knows at least they aren’t frivolous airline flights), I’m just saying the previous poster isn’t being rude… it’s a valid point.
This is an assumption though, they could be running a large diesel generator for all we know.
I updated my comment.
Dont want to be snarky, but thats the summary of what you just said.
So no, I only use overproduction to mine and only a fraction of it. Everything else goes back into the grid.
> Dont want to be snarky, but...
it's a bit like saying "no pun intended" right before intentionally saying a pun. It is literally easier to just make the point.
I think anyone involved in a PoW system (holding, mining, spending) is legitimising wasting energy. Even if you're using a sustainable source, others aren't, and the power you're using could have been used elsewhere.
Your personal impact might have been small, but it still takes serious compartmentalization or blissful ignorance to be involved in crypto and profess care for the environment.
I think RandomX, the one related to Monero, is still relatively viable for example.
Ironically this one is still a bit more friendly to CPUs, which everyone seems to have forgotten about.
I dabbled with GPUs but it seemed like I'd have to do a lot of clock/voltage tuning to make it worthwhile. This was way before energy prices jumping, too
ETH ASICs weren't much better than just getting the latest GPU.
Also, many miners are already using software that automatically changes their hardware to target whatever coin has the most profitability. It’s expected that this will continue just without ETH
https://blockworks.co/proof-of-work-ethereum-fork-pow-rally-...
I'd expect the value of ETHW to crash fairly rapidly, though, because there are not many buyers interested in buying into a deprecated chain without official support or ecosystem buy-in, and lots of sellers who need to sell their mined ETHW to fund mining operations. Then we'll see miners shut off and leave the network, as the mining rewards can no longer support the electricity costs of mining. At some point it might get 51%'d, but at that point nobody will care.
Previously ETC was often used as a lower cost dev-testing server for ETH applications that might not be ready for the main-net.
Life hates vacuum. Short of outright ban, nothing will change in that space.
That influx won't increase the revenue though... more miners doesn't produce more coins, it's just more secure.
Considering how thin theses margins can be for miners, some will need to stop their production.
Now that layer is gone, its this proof-of-stake which is a bit funny since, Ponzi schemes are also proof-of-stake, where the previous investors stake's performance signals the next until the order books flip to a highly skewed with a very long til, it results in the last group who were late to the party, get caught with the bags.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are many whales dumping as they would know (and I hope so) what the new paradigm shift is in this digital ponzi gold rush.
Also rather anxious for these fellas who promoted securities written on ethereum. The SEC flat out came out and said almost all cryptocurrencies passes the howey test recently. This PoS seems perfectly timed for the occassion.
Also, a Ponzi scheme requires fraud, where the earlier investors are being lied-to about where the money comes from in order to paint a false financial picture of the company.
Not directly related to your point, but I wanted to put that out there since it's a pet-peeve of mine that "Ponzi" gets frequently misused as a label for anything the speaker thinks is unsustainable.
so you mean like pre-mine token sales? wait aren't those securities because there is an expectation of returns from the work of others?
what you write here could be used against you, consult your lawyer before you admit anything!
But here's the funny thing that no-one gets: all assets are a ponzi scheme (stocks are only worth something now because future rubes will buy them for more later), what makes bad ponzi schemes is when the underlying asset that everyone is speculating on doesn't do anything useful.
Stocks are valuable because they are a claim on the assets and future profits of a company, as well as a claim on the ownership and control of the company.
Some people buy stocks just in the hope that a Greater Fool will buy them for more money later, but that's not the same thing as calling stocks in general a "ponzi scheme".
Also, what's your comment on the multiples expansion that all stocks have seen since the 1990's?
Are you under the impression that you can buy Ethereum without paying transaction fees to stakers?
Well then what does Ethereum do actually? And why exactly can't those centralized transactions be denominated in "Coinbase points" without all the crazy "Proof-of" code?
Btw, Binance has done this with BNB and their USD stable coin, and they are top ranked coins by market cap, so in fact sometimes it is the case that having a highly centralized and liquid coin backed by a major player is good enough.
And that doesn't feel anything like a ponzi scheme to you? Because, again, as you state, people are not using Ethereum (that would require paying fees to old investors) they are buying it (in hopes that they aren't too late to become an old investor themselves).
Or are you literally saying that the value of ETH is that "Aesthetically, it's nicer to see 'ETH' at the end of an account balance than it is to see 'USD'"?
People are using Ethereum, they are paying transaction fees to use it. Those fees mostly do not go to stakers, they are mostly burned. Even if that weren't the case, it's not even close to a ponzi because the stakers aren't paid out by future stakers, they are paid out by diluting everyone and via fees for usage.
Also to address your second point, I'm not saying that, but that would not make it a ponzi at all. Art has this property, art isn't a ponzi.
Why exactly are people staking then? How are they being rewarded for slashing risk? Who do you think gets the gas fees? You know ETH2 still has them, right?
> the stakers aren't paid out by future stakers, they are paid out by diluting everyone and via fees for usage.
Again, you’re absolutely misinformed here, but aren’t crypto maximalists supposed to be all about how bad inflation in fiat is? Or is that old news?
> Also to address your second point, I'm not saying that, but that would not make it a ponzi at all. Art has this property, art isn't a ponzi.
You’re the one who said “most ethereal is bought on centralized exchanges”! You can’t have it both ways.
The people paying a fee do not expect to make a profit off of holding ethereum. (Some of them do, but that's a coincidence in the same way that a shop owner might shop at their own store).
So, have we observed global energy usage go down by about one Finland?
Shouldn't that be observable somehow? Shouldn't there be some power stations reducing their output as a reaction to reduced demand?
Anyone know how this would be visible, and on what kind of time frame we expect it to become visible?
I'm not claiming it hasn't happened. I just feel surprised to not see more coverage of that in this article, nor here in the comments. Energy efficiency is largely the point of this major change. Shouldn't there be graphs of the power grids everywhere showing a big drop? Maybe my expectations are just off on that.