> 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?