Ethereum is proof of stake and doesn’t use tons of energy.

I get you have an axe to grind but it would be better in a thread about Ethereum tech rather than an application. You are being really annoying and against the spirit of HN.

It is my understanding that proof of stake merely reduces the energy needs of the block chain at large by an order of magnitude or two. The blockchain is thus still an extremely electricity-intensive and inefficient technology that provides little value to humanity at large and is still yet to find an application beyond gambling and scamming.

I'm sorry you find my comments annoying; at least find solace in the mutuality of it.

> yet to find an application beyond gambling and scamming.

Besides the only immutable planet-scale consensus of history, of course.

Good grief.

What good does immutability truly do you? What are the pros and cons? It is not obvious to me the pros outweigh the cons.

Next decade's winners can't change the way history was recorded.

That's a pro. Very good! Now how about you exercise some intellectual honesty and provide some cons as well?

You're doing an excellent job on your own, cupcake.

"Very good", take off.

somebody's grump they couldn't con another sucker into the grift industry :'(

I'll only engage with the parts of your comments that are in good faith, few as they may be.

If you know of any alternative proposals for creating an incentive structure to store an unadulterated log of...whatever it may be that random humans may want to share with future humans, please share.

It seems like a valuable goal.

That's not an application. It's a technological result. It may or may not be applied for productive work (I'd say on the whole the negative results have outweighed the positive so far, especially looking at the ecosystem as a whole)

Were you also a critic of the first computing devices themselves, by chance?

they also weren't applications, if that's what you're implying. But they quickly found quite a lot of highly valuable ones.

Let's save each other some time:

What's more likely?

You convince the Internet connected world not to adopt a proof of consensus mechanism via HN comment and related butterfly effects,

or something just like the posted app/service not only exists but thrives in under 5 years?

I don't think I need to convince them because they're not adopting it. So no, I don't expect this to have actual users in 6 months, let alone 5 years.

Users aren't adopting Ethereum?

Now I know for certain we can call it here.

Sorry we didn't get further, reader.

I find various sports, video games, and reality TV totally useless and waste of time, energy, and a scam on people’s limited time on this earth. Doesn’t mean I want it outlawed.

I never said I want it outlawed. That would deprive me of the clowns to laugh at.

it's more like 4 orders of magnitude. Resource usage isn't really a good criticism of ethereum specifically anymore (it can still be squarely aimed at bitcoin, which has always been the biggest problem)

Do you have an objective, dispassionate, uninvested source for this number?

Electricity use was reduced by 99.98% with the transition to PoS

Do you have an objective, dispassionate, uninvested source for this?

> It is my understanding that proof of stake merely reduces the energy needs of the block chain at large by an order of magnitude or two.

Try over three orders of magnitude.

The old Ethereum chain consumed 78 TWh per year. The new Ethereum chain consumes 0.0026 TWh per year.

For context, YouTube runs on 12 TWh per year. So the old Ethereum consumed the power of 6.5 YouTubes, and currently YouTube consumes the power of 4,615 new Ethereums.

So you really can't be more wrong about Ethereum still being "extremely electricity-intensive". It's just disinformation at this point.

Well said.

Can you provide a source for how this consumption is being measured?

Can you provide a source for how proof of stake only reduces energy usage by "merely an order of magnitude or two"?

No. It's not something I truly care about. I did some back of the envelope math a year or two ago when I looked into proof of stake and then stopped looking into the space altogether after encountering some of the people in the space. That any amount of electricity is being consumed or any amount of e-waste is being generated for the the gambling hobby horse of a small handful of already wealthy individuals is pretty fucking stupid imo.

So, having now established that people who don't care also don't have good sources, let's get back to you, somebody who does actually care. Do you have any sources? If not, why not? "Crypto has rotted my brain" is an acceptable answer, fyi.

I care about crypto (in both senses of cryptography and cryptocurrency), but the amount I care for this conversation is admittedly beginning to wane. There was already another thread where someone cited a source and then went back and forth with you for a bit about the source's potential biases. If you really wanted to estimate the energy consumption yourself, thus verifying all the sources, here's what you could do:

* Sync a copy of the Ethereum blockchain. It should be pretty straightforward to tell if you have a good copy, because that's like, blockchain's whole "thing".

* Pick out the "difficulty" field in the last proof-of-work block header, then divide it into the hashrate and power consumption of typical mining hardware at the time. This gives you the "before" consumption figure.

* Pick out the total number of validators in the latest proof-of-stake block header. Remove validators that share withdrawal addresses, as they are run by the same entity and likely all run on a single piece of hardware (or few).

* Multiply that number of validators by the typical hardware power consumption of an i5 desktop computer with an SSD, which is likely what most of them are running on.

I'll leave that as an exercise for you to not do.

> That any amount of electricity is being consumed or any amount of e-waste is being generated for the the gambling hobby horse of a small handful of already wealthy individuals is pretty fucking stupid imo.

You must hate AAA gaming, then. Same wealthy people, same e-waste being created purely to shuffle pixels around and keep them from being bored. Crypto brought you and me together in this thread, and I'm sure you can agree that we're both entertained, right?

> My understanding is that they use NFTs on the Ethereum chain for authentication

Your understanding is imperfect. You use your private key on Ethereum to authenticate, not an NFT. It does seem like certain NFTs gate access to different parts of the site.

> NFTs are still wildly damaging to the ecosystem, with how much electricity they demand

Not really anymore. As others have pointed out, the switch to PoS massively reduced Ethereum's energy demands, by ~99.5%. https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2023/04/26/ethereums-lifetime-...

> Their sole purpose is to be traded as chits in a series of wealth extractions, until some unfortunate sucker is left holding the bag on a worthless blob of data that (rightfully) nobody wants.

Ya, unfortunately the space is rife with grifters and hype in weird places, but that doesn't seem relevant to this specific project though.

> So I believe it is a reasonable assumption that it is in this form so the creators can get in on the scam-o-sphere that is Ethereum/NFT.

Or they're trying to make something legit within this space. The Internet's early use cases were largely a bunch of scams and over-hyped projects that failed miserably. That didn't exactly hold for long though.

The electricity argument has been made moot a while ago with the switch the proof of stake.

Not all NFTs need to be bought or sold. They can just as easily be used as membership tokens that are given away.

Also, according to the website, only some of the communities will be locked behind NFTs. Others appear to be free to join just with an Ethereum account used as auth.

I haven't used the service so I'm not going to defend it but it makes sense for web3 communities to base their auth around the tech they're already using, and that is crypto wallets. Everyone in the community already has crypto wallets so the friction to join is very low.

The electricity argument might have been mitigated, but I don't believe it is moot. If it was moot then it would be entirely irrelevant. It is still relevant because the power requirements might have been reduced, but that means nothing for the total power consumption. Indeed, it is possible for power requirements to decrease while simultaneously not abating or even increasing power consumption!

Also, with the move to proof-of-stake, the winner-takes-all-ness of it is even worse. It is now even easier for early movers to continue reaping marginal rewards. It is a system designed to entrench and centralize power.

It’s actually one of the biggest points of Proof of STAKE. People put ETH on the line, a substantial risk, to act accordingly to the rules set by nodes. Early adopters and the most passionate reap the rewards by buying earlier, and securing the network. Higher price also means higher security as it makes it harder and harder for bad actors to buy ETH and attack the network.

Right, but it also means that any legitimate users who get in later and want to genuinely participate are put on a permanent backfoot. Because ethereum is deflationary, and because PoS ensures marginal rewards goes to the biggest scammers- sorry I mean "the most passionate"- then the people who have more will get more.

This is also a flaw shared by the actual real world economy used by big girls and boys. However, crypto has also innovated many many more flaws and insecurities. So I'd rather stick to the bad system we have now, vs the worse system designed by grifters who quite literally just do not understand fucking anything about sensible ways to organize people.

I don’t understand who is the one being “scammed” when a person runs a consensus and execution layer clients along with their 32 ETH? They attest and propose blocks so that users’ transactions get included in the blocks.

If you’re talking about the gas fees, that’s the pricing market at work, similar to toll fees for cars for highways. Layer 2s would be the train or megabuses on those highways - amortized gas costs by the number of people on them.

PoS ensures marginal rewards to everyone equally with the same percentage unlike Bitcoin. You either bought ETH at $8 a pop back in 2017, or you’re now buying it at $1850.

After the Ethereum merge, the Energy Usage of any ETH token is negligible. Do you have any source for this "NFTs are damaging because how much electricity they demand" or is just plain old Hacker News "Crypto Bad" fud?

Do you have any source for (a) how much electricity the blockchain requires after the merge and (b) whether there are any applications outside of gambling and scamming that can not be done otherwise?

This is the definition of a self-interested source. How about you provide a resource that doesn't so immediately stand to profit from convincing others?

Why don't you look at the software and do your own analysis.

Because I don't have that kind of time to waste. I'm busy doing things that actually bring me joy and further my place in life by my own endeavors, instead of hoping for a windfall delivered unto me by the pure happenstance of a crypto market.

Taking time out of my day to give grief to crypto enthusiasts is just a public service. No need to thank me.

Has it ever occurred to you that many of the people who both use cryptocurrency and Hacker News are old-school cryptography nerds who genuinely enjoy that crypto gives them the same level of absolute control over their money that GPG gives them over their communications, Veracrypt gives them over their data, or Linux gives them over their devices?

I honestly think it's kind of pathetic for you to come in and crap on things that bring other people joy, just because you personally don't like it, or you just inherently hate people who enjoy gambling or something.

If it's proof enough, I've personally run both the energy-heavy PoW mining software and the energy-light PoS software over the years, and I've witnessed the difference in my electricity bill. But you probably consider me a "self-interested source" too, because I don't share your same visceral hate of people who decided to band together and run a database.

So what have you done to help police the bad actors of the crypto community? My biggest problem with the technology is that it's inefficient and filled with scam artists. I enjoy recreational chemistry, so I volunteer my time and money towards testing other people's substances. I see no attempt by crypto people to do any amount of policing within the community.

It is not simply a "group of people who decided to band together and run a database." It is a technological movement of the most delusional in tech combined with the most delusional in finance. It is the hypercapitalist urges of the collective unconscious swirling as an undercurrent, yearning to grab hold of the reins of society. It is an awful, truly stupid way to organize people, and the wet dream of the most enthusiastic is that it becomes a legitimate societal force.

If you are bought into crypto, then yes: you stand to benefit from persuading others into joining the cottage industry. That is not controversial. That is not incorrect. That is the incentives. It is a parallel deflationary economy. If you partake in that parallel economy, you are incentived to sucker more money into it. Simple as.

Why should I listen to people whose payout is tied to their ability to get me to fork over money for 1s and 0s?

> I see no attempt by crypto people to do any amount of policing within the community.

What have you done to help police meth labs? After all, they're part of your "recreational chemistry" community.

"Oh, but I don't associate with those guys. They're not part of my community, they just happen to use some of the same tools that I do."

Exactly.

> It is not simply a "group of people who decided to band together and run a database." It is a technological movement of the most delusional in tech combined with the most delusional in finance. It is the hypercapitalist urges of the collective unconscious swirling as an undercurrent, yearning to grab hold of the reins of society. It is an awful, truly stupid way to organize people, and the wet dream of the most enthusiastic is that it becomes a legitimate societal force.

That's some nice poetry, but blockchains are literally an inherently meaningless database of ones and zeros that some people have chosen to ascribe meaning to. It's not like a cryptographic hash can spring out of your screen and bite you. You're angry at an inanimate tool that performs a function if you elect to use it, like a toaster or a kettle. Do you also yell at your microwave oven? Do you kick your TV? Where does all this anger come from?

> Why should I listen to people whose payout is tied to their ability to get me to fork over money for 1s and 0s?

Nobody said you should or have to. But if you're going to start posting misinformation on the internet, maybe you should stop acting so indignant when people correct you.

> Exactly.

Did you think you scored some sort of point there, champ? You literally put words in my mouth and then did a victory jig.

I test drugs for meth so people don't consume them. Upon finding a tainted batch, I do my best to investigate and report the offending party to the appropriate precinct. Then I also inform people within a geosocial circle about the problem. This denies profit and helps clean up bad actors.

So, in summary, you played guess roulette and lost real bad, then proceeded on the basis of that strawman anyway. Outstanding job!

And I'm not getting angry at the tool. Truly, to get mad at something inanimate like software would be farcical. I'm not mad at the software. I'm mad at the people. The people who created this perfect shit storm of scams and grifts, along with the grifters themselves.

How many people have been suckered into this now? How many people have needlessly lost so much of their earnings because they, in good faith, trusted people like you and these other wholesome "old school cryptography nerds"? no.

Keep dodging accountability, pond scum.

> I test drugs for meth so people don't consume them. Upon finding a tainted batch, I do my best to investigate and report the offending party to the appropriate precinct. Then I also inform people within a geosocial circle about the problem. This denies profit and helps clean up bad actors.

I write up fraudulent cryptocurrency products so people don't use them. Upon finding a grift, I do my best to investigate (reporting it is futile because police don't understand solidity code). Then I also inform people within a social circle about the problem. This denies profit and helps clean up bad actors.

For example, I wrote up TerraUSD's faulty stability scheme to my social circle months before the project actually ended up imploding and making national news.

But neither of us have some ethical imperative to do any of that. I could just... not be the guy who writes up scams. You could just... not be the guy who tests stuff for meth. There's nothing morally wrong about just using your tools to do stuff, without any concern for any illegal things that other people are using those same types of tools to do.

> How many people have needlessly lost so much of their earnings because they, in good faith, trusted people like you and these other wholesome "old school cryptography nerds"?

None, because people like me do not encourage others to invest in cryptocurrency. In fact, I recommend against it unless someone has some background in computer science, because it's so easy to get scammed. I only share my cryptocurrency knowledge with others if they bring up the topic first and actively ask for my input. In fact, I'm kind of annoyed in a way that cryptocurrency went so mainstream and is no longer a niche hacker hobby - the community used to feel so much more tightly knit back in 2010 when I was part of a small group of libertarian nerds posting on the bitcointalk forums. IIRC, I only missed Satoshi's last post there by about a year.

> I'm mad at the people. The people who created this perfect shit storm of scams and grifts, along with the grifters themselves.

Alright, then why are you mad at me? I didn't create any scams or grifts. The only crimes I committed were to learn more than you about this new imaginary ledger system, then trade some of my Real Money for these imaginary casino chips that I used to play pretend with some of my buddies on the forums. It's not my fault people started mortgaging their houses over monopoly money.

> Keep dodging accountability, pond scum.

Keep getting angry at me for using mathematics. Maybe someday I'll be held accountable for all those poor numbers I multiplied together.