Ethereum's Cryptocurrency Will 'Jettison' Mining for Speedier Proof-of-Stake (bloombergquint.com) 142
"Ethereum is making big changes," writes Bloomberg. "Perhaps the most important is the jettisoning of the 'miners' who track and validate transactions on the the world's most-used blockchain network.
Miners are the heart of a system known as proof of work. It was pioneered by Bitcoin and adopted by Ethereum, and has come under increasing criticism for its environmental impact: Bitcoin miners now use as much electricity as some small nations. Along with being greener and faster, proponents say the switch, now planned to be phased in by early 2022, will illustrate another difference between Ethereum and Bitcoin: A willingness to change, and to see the network as a product of community as much as code...
The idea behind proof of stake is that the blockchain can be secured more simply if you give a group of people carrot-and-stick incentives to collaborate in checking and crosschecking transactions... It's thought that switching to proof of stake would cuts Ethereum's energy use, estimated at 45,000 gigawatt hours by 99.9%. Like any other venture depending on cloud computing, its carbon footprint would then be only be that of its servers. It also is expected to increase the network speed. That's important for Ethereum, which has ambitions of becoming a platform for a vast range of financial and commercial transactions. Currently, Ethereum handles about 30 transactions per second. With sharding, Vitalik Buterin, the inventor of Ethereum, thinks that could go to 100,000 per second.
In a proof of stake system, it would be harder than in a proof of work system for a group to gain control of the process, but it would still be possible: The more Ether a person or group stakes, the better the chance of being chosen as a validator or attestor. Economic disincentives have been put in place to dissuade behavior that is bad for the network.
The article also argues that Bitcoin's "growing dominance by huge, centralized mining farms" is "antithetical to a system that was designed to be decentralized."
The idea behind proof of stake is that the blockchain can be secured more simply if you give a group of people carrot-and-stick incentives to collaborate in checking and crosschecking transactions... It's thought that switching to proof of stake would cuts Ethereum's energy use, estimated at 45,000 gigawatt hours by 99.9%. Like any other venture depending on cloud computing, its carbon footprint would then be only be that of its servers. It also is expected to increase the network speed. That's important for Ethereum, which has ambitions of becoming a platform for a vast range of financial and commercial transactions. Currently, Ethereum handles about 30 transactions per second. With sharding, Vitalik Buterin, the inventor of Ethereum, thinks that could go to 100,000 per second.
In a proof of stake system, it would be harder than in a proof of work system for a group to gain control of the process, but it would still be possible: The more Ether a person or group stakes, the better the chance of being chosen as a validator or attestor. Economic disincentives have been put in place to dissuade behavior that is bad for the network.
The article also argues that Bitcoin's "growing dominance by huge, centralized mining farms" is "antithetical to a system that was designed to be decentralized."
change (Score:3)
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Too bad the one thing that matters, price/value, refuses to stop changing.
Ethereum = Centralized Toy Database (Score:3, Insightful)
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And that's the big problem: people keep looking at crypto as a get rich quick scheme. But crypto has a much more noble and useful application if we can just get past the false idea of getting rich off of it. It could be great for digital cash. Wouldn't it be great if you could send cash to someone without Paypal/Venmo/Visa policing it? People without bank accounts/reliable banking system could certainly use something like that. Then there are utility use cases such as tracking assets (Raven) or authent
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Jack: #wtfhappenedin1971 https://twitter.com/jack/statu... [twitter.com]
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Cryptocurrency gets to do very limited KYC at the edges of the network, this massively cuts down cost. It created an entirely new regulatory niche.
Using the blockchain as a low required trust storage system for signatures etc is cute, but you could do that with a full reserve fiat backed coin as well (like Diem). You can even have multiple issuers for decentralization if you want. Doesn't require an entirely new currency with everyone chasing their shot at buying in to a currency which moons, the zero sum c
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Unfortunately, as much as people insist of sticking the money "currency" to them, cryptocurrencies are a lousy attempt at digital cash. 10 years in, Bitcoin still has the exact same flaws and limitations it when it was first introduced.
There's good reason pretty much no one uses Bitcoin et all as currency. The only reason you have it in the news today is that it became a high-rising speculative asset over the past year.
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And bank fees will blow yours. It's amazing how much money they demand for something that could be accomplished with 1 SQL statement.
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That's exactly why banks in the U.S. need some competition. They've got the banking sector locked up to prevent that so it'll take something from outside to provide that competition.
I'm pretty skeptical of the hype over bitcoin, but I don't have the delusion tyhat U.S. banks are the answer either.
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Seriously, some elements of the crypto currency community are so toxic, it's painful to watch. For some reason, Charles Hoskinson and Cardano/ADA get an disproportionate amount of the hate.
Probably because certain elements of the Bitcoin and Etherium communities know that Cardano is at the moment probably the most well researched and robust crypto framework in existence, and many feel their "market share" threatened by its rise.
You just have to watch 5 minutes of Charles Hoskinsons' YouTube channel, or his
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Yup, lack of valuable commentary detected as expected. Even if Ethereum were bad, you wouldn't know why. You would just post nonsense like this.
Re: change (Score:3)
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Yes, unlike real currencies where you can negotiate transactions, contracts, & legislate fees & taxes, the volatility of a virtual commodity makes all these agreements pointless. Blockchain's proof of concept, decentralised record keeping works. It just doesn't do the things that a currency needs to. How do you control inflation, recessions, bubbles, or other threats to economic stability?
Well, if you find anyone who knows how to do that with paper money, do let us all know. Can you try to do it before the current inflationary bubble bursts and causes yet another recession that makes the rich richer? I reckon you have two or three years,
Pretty simple really (Score:5, Interesting)
In 1978 and 1979 the US Congress passed an act giving the Federal Open Market Committee the task of stabilizing the US dollar. They did so because the dollar had been fluctuating more than anyone would like, with 15% inflation some years.
FOMC set up some programs to stabilize the dollar, got inflation down to 6% of the next years, and has kept the dollar stable since then. They were also given the task of minimizing unemployment through monetary policy, which generally means actions that would cause inflation. So they have a balancing act to do.
With a target of 2%, they've consistently stayed in the 0%-6% range. (Going negative might cause disastrous feedback loop, so they target slightly positive). They can allow up to about 6% in times when they want more dollars to reduce unemployment.
It turns out to be pretty simple - the price of anything is determined by supply and demand. Dollars are no different. If not dollars are available, the price of dollars goes down. When fewer dollars are available, when they are more scarce, the price goes up.
The key is to put the power to regulate the amount of dollars into the hands of people whose goal is stable prices. The ability to decide how many dollars there are is the ability to choose the value of a dollar. Give that power to people who want stable currency, you'll get stable stable currency.
The way to screw it up is to give that power to politicians whose goal is to get re-elected in the short term. Politicians print more money and hand it out, which provides a short term boost that helps them on election day. However, it causes inflation.
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Politicians print more money and hand it out, which provides a short term boost that helps them on election day. However, it causes inflation.
Can you give one example since 1971 (when the gold standard was dropped) when the Fed issuing more currency has led to inflation in the USA? - Fiscal Conservative think tank opinions don't count.
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Can you give one example since 1971 (when the gold standard was dropped) when the Fed issuing more currency has led to inflation in the USA? - Fiscal Conservative think tank opinions don't count.
The Carter Dark Ages. Remember when the news headline every day was how high the prime interest rate had gotten, to discount inflation?
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You mean how many times has the thing that causes inflation caused inflation? Wouldn't the answer have to be "every time"?
I see you're caught in a feedback loop of circular reasoning. You could also try, "Because reasons!" Alternatively, although you might find this challenging, you could try studying just a little about the history of economics & economic interventions that have been tried over the decades & how & why they succeeded &/or failed.
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Let me put it even more straightforward for you?
Would you do your regular job for $200/hour?
Yeah, you would. Why? Because $200 is worth more than an hour of your time.
If you already had $1.5 billion dollars, would you work your job for $200/hour? Probably not, because once you have plenty of dollars, having a tiny bit more isn't worth much.
How about of each of your neighbors has a billion dollars or so. Do you think they'd all get up at 6:30AM to go to work?
The more dollars you have, the less they are worth
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I'm just curious, what's your incentive to try to convince yourself that use things that are rare don't sell for higher prices than things that are extremely common?
Is there some *reason* you want to deny supply and demand?
Did you have a personal issue with an economics teacher when you were a kid?
I'm just curious, since you seem to be so very intent in denying the obvious. I mean heck, flat earthers are at least denying something that CAN'T see. You're denying something you see all the time, that shortages
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Still wondering.
It's quite curious when you find someone who wants to convince themselves that supply and demand isn't a thing, that prices don't go up when there is a shortage.
So I ask again, what's your motivation? WHY do you need to convince yourself that shit that's widely available, like air, isn't expensive?
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Because economic systems don't behave in the way you're describing. There are no 1:1, cause-effect truisms in modern economics. For a broad, generic definition of complex systems see: http://web.mit.edu/esd.83/www/... [mit.edu]
Simply put, the supply of currency is one of many relevant factors that influences an economy. Sometimes increasing it will have inflationary effects but only when other important factors are in alignment to create that effect. In other words, increasing currency supply alone is insufficient t
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Well, if you find anyone who knows how to do that with paper money, do let us all know. Can you try to do it before the current inflationary bubble bursts and causes yet another recession that makes the rich richer? I reckon you have two or three years,
ie. The Rich are doing that with paper money. Today.
And voting for people like Donald Trump makes it much, much worse.
("Drain the swamp" - yeah, right!)
Re:change (Score:5, Insightful)
Ethereum was subject to change by consent of everybody using it. Just like Bitcoin is. There's no such thing as "longest chain wins". In all cases, the reality is "software people choose to run wins". That "one entity" can't make just any change.
And drop the "store of value" bullshit. Nobody uses any cryptocurrency, least of all Bitcoin, as a store of value. None of them, especially not Bitcoin, is a store of value. People use them for pure rent seeking. Every gold-bugger who says "store of value" really means "speculation". Fuck your store of value.
A truly useful, world-changing cryptocurrency would have stable value in terms of real goods, not some other currency. It would have practically perfectly privacy and fungibility. It would scale to handle every transaction on the planet. It would clear transactions fast. It would have low fees. It would have have low environmental impact. Smart contracts and "DeFi" masturbation are strictly optional add-ons.
Nothing meets the criteria now. I doubt Ethereum ever will. Bitcoin meets none of them, and the Bitcoin community's unwillingness to change ensures that if it never will. Bitcoin is a toy for people who want to retire without ever working and without ever adding any real value.
And PoW needs to be outlawed, everywhere. We have fucked the climate of this planet, and cannot afford to burn that kind of electricity for your "store of value" wet dreams.
Do it already. (Score:5, Insightful)
They've been talking about this for how long now?
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I know, right? The Ethereum Foundation has been dragging their heels on PoS for a long time. Should have had it two years ago.
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Two years ago, the first good paper [iacr.org] on provably secure proof-of-stake blockchains had just been published. If Ethereum adopted PoS that long ago, it would have had known security flaws.
Has there been any good analysis of the security assumptions and claims for the actual protocol that Ethereum picked, or is it mostly hand-waving?
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The circular logic of PoS:
1. The list of valid transactions determines who has coin.
2 [Complexly for marketing purpose]
3. People with coin decide which transactions are valid.
4. GOTO 1
This should be enough for anyone to abandon the idea.
https://twitter.com/WittyUsern... [twitter.com]
https://twitter.com/BobMcElrat... [twitter.com]
Simplifying further: People are greedy (Score:2)
Proof of stake depends on one assumption: people are greedy.
Those who do the right thing get more coins. If they do bad, they lose their coins. The assumption is that people don't want to lose their money.
You decide for yourself if that's a safe a assumption.
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If "bad" is centralizing what was intended to be a decentralized system, then someone should ask how exactly requiring what comes down to a $128,000 deposit for eac
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Proof of Stake was in discussion as far back as 2016/2017.
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Yes, with known security problems that were more significant than the 51% attack for PoW.
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Nope! No "known security problems that were more significant than 51% attacks". But hey keep banging that drum! Meanwhile, a number of blockchain projects have left Ethereum in the dust on Proof of Stake:
https://ripplecoinnews.com/bes... [ripplecoinnews.com]
Those blockchains haven't imploded yet.
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Your unbacked assertion is still wrong. The nothing-at-stake problem (https://golden.com/wiki/Nothing-at-stake_problem) rewards forks. Long range attacks encourage compromising other users. PoS blockchains in 2019 shared a "fake stake" vulnerability: https://medium.com/@dsl_uiuc/f... [medium.com] . There are also sour milk / double forgery attacks. These were not solved then.
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Here is the Ethereum Pyramid diagram: https://twitter.com/gladstein/... [twitter.com]
This is the right diagram to understand how Ethereum operates.
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Are your sockpuppets modding up your AC posts again? Seems so!
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At least they're doing it finally. A lot of cryptocurrency orgs would assume their user base wouldn't follow them, and just keep on forever (or until the world burned.)
Re:Do it already. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, I'm starting to think that this is more of a PR stunt from the Ethereum team than a real development effort effort over the past few years.
They know that they're getting bad press for helping to make the late 2020/2021 GPU shortage even worse than it already was, so the team has to show that they're doing something to avoid government regulation. You have to think that they would already been rolling out these changes NOW if they were serious about it, though.
nothing new (Score:5, Interesting)
this has been in the works since 2017.. so why pushing the narrative now?
Besides the author conveniently avoid the cons of Proof of Stake.
POS is similar to the banking cartel, except it uses a blockchain to keep track of who has the decision power.
POS networks are effectively controlled by a cartel of big entities who control 51%+ of the stake.
POW transaction history is protected by real energy. Txs on a POS blockchain can be rewritten at will by a majority.
There are already many POS networks. EOS is one of them. Ethereum is riding the hype of POS but once reality sets in, people will see the limits.
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51% attacks already exist on PoW networks. Not sure where you're going with this. The only way PoS fails where PoW succeeds is if too few "small" parties agree to stake. 51% attacks under PoS will only happen if everyone just throws their hands up, says "no thanks", and hands control of txn verification to a few small parties.
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Ethereum = Centralized Scam
PoS = Centralized nonsense
The Ethereum's miners are the last element of pseudo-decentralization. Removing them is the right way to make Ethereum equivalent to a primitive centralized database.
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That is neither accurate nor "Informative". Ethereum is, by definition, not centralized. Not like an LN node or anything. As usual, you have nothing to contribute other than to throw around vague "factual" declarations.
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> 51% attacks under PoS will only happen if everyone just throws their hands up, says "no thanks"
No, it statistically goes to whomever has the most money to throw at $ETH. This is how oligarchies are formed in every economic system.
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In the stock market, it's how high-speed trading works. It takes a great deal of investment to tap that arbitrage first, but once achieved it can be very profitable.
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With proof-of-work, in theory, anyone with enough compute resources could come in and get new mining rewards. With proof-of-stake, you have to buy your way in with the cryptocurrency. Either the already-rich get more tokens from mining and commissions, or they get to cash out their existing stake. Worst case, trades between other parties drive up the nominal value of their stake. That's a pretty nice setup for the PoS insiders.
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Antibody in the world can buy those compute resources without enriching the existing insiders. That's not true story proof-of-stake blockchains. They are designed to enrich the already rich.
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51% attacks already exist on PoW networks. Not sure where you're going with this. The only way PoS fails where PoW succeeds is if too few "small" parties agree to stake. 51% attacks under PoS will only happen if everyone just throws their hands up, says "no thanks", and hands control of txn verification to a few small parties.
Small networks yep. But not on Bitcoin. Because in the end POW is protected by ENERGY. The energy available on earth is finite.
POS works differently. If your entities under your control have 51% of the stake (similar to a company where if you have 51% of the shares you take control), you have absolute covert or overt control. Depending on your strategy for profits.. covert or overt.
That power allows technically to change the past covertly or overtly depending on the number of nodes on the network and the a
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There is no function in PoS clients to retroactively change the blockchain, they'd have to force through a hard fork first which all the other nodes are free to ignore.
PoW transaction history can be changed cheaply too if you just change the difficulty, by forcing through a hard fork first which all the other nodes are free to ignore.
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PoW transaction history cannot be changed without doing the work again. Energy protects the data. It is based on the assumption that anyone is able to run nodes and be able to keep in check the miners. You as a miner cannot change the difficulty. Its part of the algo.
That is why most Bitcoiners are small blockers. They want african laptops to sync the chain and be a node. this unable them be work as a full peer.
POS client don't have function to change history of course. It would happen by the works of insid
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POW = let's burn this big pile of cheap coal to make money in crypto! What could go wrong?!
POS is hardly free of problems (such as people with little money getting hoovered by people with lots of money), but it least it doesn't take the global climate with it.
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Quite the contrary. PoS, once the total network value is high enough, is nearly impossible to subvert. Even if someone could invest hundreds of billions or more in subverting the network, they'd just lose the money. PoW, on the other hand, can be subverted simply by taking over the computing power, or preventing such computing power from being used. We've already seen large percentages of a network go down because of an outage. PoW is very centralised (because of its dependency on cheap power). PoS at least
Size of blockchain (Score:3)
Storage is cheap, of course. Still, if Ethereum wants to process thousands of transactions per second, the size of the blockchain will eventually be a problem. It's currently around 270MB, with growth of over 100MB in the past year. If they could process 100x as many transactions (say, 3000 instead of 30 per second), it would be growing at around 1TB per year. Even with cheap storage, that makes for a seriously non-trivial storage requirement. The result will also be a tendency to centralization, because ordinary folk will have no chance of even downloading the blockchain.
Are the plans to deal with this? Perhaps archiving large parts of the history, so that the active blockchain at any point is only the last few weeks worth?
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I realized that a couple of years back, all blockchains have this issue when we're talking of something like frequent money transfers. If there is no way to prune out ageing blocks the growth will become unmanageable. Someone will have to find a way to keep a few complete ledgers that will be in a size of Petabytes (if society doesn't collapse), and a subset-ledger that only stores active coins and their last x years of transactions. And a way to verify against the complete chain. But when this happens the
Re: Size of blockchain (Score:1)
Re: Size of blockchain (Score:2)
Years ago there was this plan on slashdot to build a 1TB array for less than $1000. So much storage for such a small price was simply amazing and showed just how much storage costs has fallen. Capacity had steadily been going up and costs have been steadily going down since then.
A PB of disk is achievable right now, expensive but achieveable. It will be readily affordable long before it's needed by bitcoin or ether.
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Your numbers are wildly wrong. Today the Ethereum chain weights [ycharts.com] 917 GB, and a year ago it weighted 456 GB. Even if you use Parity, it's still around of 400 GB.
The "plan" to deal with it has been in action for a long time already: most nodes don't have the full history anymore. They only keep a chunk of the most recent blocks, and when an operation needs a value which is not on that slice, they contact a history node to get the relevant values.
Which is not very decentralised or trustless, if you ask me.
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Re: Size of blockchain (Score:2)
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They keep the hashes, ditch the blocks. Once downloaded they compute the hash for the block and compare it against the stored one.
The computed hash must be valid against the stored hash.
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They keep the hashes, ditch the blocks. Once downloaded they compute the hash for the block and compare it against the stored one.
The computed hash must be valid against the stored hash.
and so what?
You have a wrong hash. But you can't recreate the data. Its lost forever unless someone gives it to you. Imagine that all available historical nodes give you the same corrupted data. You are kicked out. game over.
In the end the decentralization of the network will be based on the number of historical nodes, which in Bitcoin is called Full Nodes but Ethereum pumpers decided to change the meaning to suit their agenda.
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My impression is that in crypto decentralized really means governed by participants, it does not mean ungoverned or auto-pilot. Decentralized means that participants (meaning providing resources to the network, mining or money or whatever it takes to participate) can propose and vote on changes. The idea is that a network could change over time as governed by a group of participants in the network that have an vested interest in the success of the network. But that those participants could be anyone with
Re: Size of blockchain (Score:1)
Re: Size of blockchain (Score:2)
This story is about proof-of-stake, which fixes the energy use.
Re: Size of blockchain (Score:2)
Because disks of 1TB don't exist? Or because broadband doesn't exist?
These both exist.
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Ether is a scam (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway, Ether is simply a token, and its owners can create as many Ether as they see fit (compare Bitcoin which has a mathematically limited supply).
One important consequence of this is that governments could take over the coin (by forcing its owners to cough up the private key) and drive it off the cliff by simply creating a gazillion Ether. Ether can therefore never be a safe store of value.
This whole scheme of moving towards Proof of Stake is nothing more than a PR stunt to lift on the Global Warming hysteria and to keep the coin somewhat relevant in the towering shadow of Bitcoin.
Re: Ether is a scam (Score:2)
There may be possible attacks but governments can't do that. They are governments, not gods.
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Believe me, after a while you'll spill the private key along with your most intimate secrets just to get out of there.
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Anyway, Ether is simply a token, and its owners can create as many Ether as they see fit (compare Bitcoin which has a mathematically limited supply).
Minor correction: Bitcoin supply isn't mathematically limited. It's limited by the consensus of the majority of network validators (i.e. "full nodes"). Not that it matters; we know the supply won't change because it would be against the interests of all validators, miners, developers, traders, and holders of Bitcoin.
Vaporware (Score:2)
Would you call it "vaporware"?
Bitcoin should be shut down (Score:1, Flamebait)
at least as it is. It wastes energy to no good/useful purpose - it just adds to the consequences that we have seen recently, eg: fires & floods.
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[Bitcoin] wastes energy to no good/useful purpose - it just adds to the consequences that we have seen recently, eg: fires & floods.
In no other case does anyone blame the demand (or use case) of energy vs the supply of energy for its planetary impact. Maybe stick to complaining about dirty sources of energy and be a proponent of clean sources rather than blaming the thing the energy is used for. Especially because blaming Bitcoin for using a lot of energy is just a bad argument.
Whether or not a thing is worth the energy it consumes is determined by the free market, and considering the price of Bitcoin today I'd say the market has det
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But getting behind clean energy is something we all can understand and get behind. So maybe focus more on energy supply rather than demand.
Side note: Much of the Bitcoin network already runs on clean energy.
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Side note: Much of the Bitcoin network already runs on clean energy.
So what? It's still computer crunching numbers; 100% of that energy is converted to heat. Having a green source for it doesn't make it any less wasteful.
Which is troublesome when you're talking about energy consumption rivaling the likes of Norway.
Proof of Work is a terrible idea... (Score:2)
...but i'd argue Proof of Stake is even worse. What this effectively does is giving those with a large stake in ETH the power to decide which transactions are valid or not. So much for "decentralized" currency, i guess.
Then again, none of this will be relevant in the long term. ETH's value will likely increase short term as people buy on the notice, to only drop down to "normal" figures again once people realize it makes no difference.
Re: Proof of Work is a terrible idea... (Score:2)
FUD. Classic anti-cryptocurency nonsense coupled with meaningless predictions.
The trolls are heavy in this story.
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Hey man, i was there for the long-hyped London fork... which made ETH gain, and lose, just 5% within 24hs.
No one gives a crap about the technology fueling ETH - or Bitcoin, for that matter.
I want proof of steaks... (Score:1)
Just like old banking then (Score:2)
So, "proof of stake" essentially allows those who hold a lot of "currency" to control what the valid transactions are. The more you hold, the more you control. How is this different from the banking as we know it?
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I'm not going to answer the question you asked, mainly because "control of transactions" isn't really a thing, beyond the 51% attack, but it's worth noting that if you think that's bad, then proof-of-work is even worse in this respect.
With PoW not only those with more money have more control, but those with more access to the hardware distribution network, and those with more access to cheap power. "Control" is much more skewed there.
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The problem with PoW is that it's heavily centralised. If instead of the Chinese government deciding to disallow mining it would just have taken over the mines, it could have killed Bitcoin outright.
PoW fans ignore the reality of it.
It's true, you can take over a PoS network with a lot of money, but then you lose a lot of money. You can take over a PoW network by force, and then have lots of hardware you can sell. The question is what would you rather have, control by the wealthy or control by criminals and
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Let me give you a refined answer.
Think about the value of the Bitcoin network. No single person has enough money to mount a 51% PoS attack against it. Some companies have, but they'd lose hundreds of billions of dollars in the attempt.
Now think about the real Bitcoin, being mined with PoW. All it would take is a few millions to take over the network. PoW takes so much power that it's easy to find mining centres, and it shouldn't be hard to take them over with force.
The more valueable a cryptocurrency will b
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POS networks will not be attacked by single persons.
They will get controlled by a cartel of token owners.. So OP was right by comparing it to the banking cartel.
And they will not attack it to lose money. They will not attack it. they will take CONTROL. Just like the current banking cartel.
POW networks don't work like that. Miners are living on the edge of profitability in order to just validate txs. That's it. They have nothing else. And they need to shop for the cheapest electricity.
Doesn't Proof of Stake (Score:2)
It's the whole "skin in the game" thing.
But that completely ignores that there are a *lot* of other terrible things you can do with an asset or currency that don't involve falsi
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It's not 51% attacks I'm worried about (Score:2)
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Cypto lost its way when it became a "business" (Score:2)
In early BitCoin days I ran a node on my computer for a short time. My approach was "another folding@home like project, that could help people one day" (no money made since I don't even paid attention to my address). I did something similar for Ethereum. However today a single person with their computer can no longer partake in these networks.
BitCoin is obvious, you need specialized machines (ASICs) produced overseas with months of lead time in deliveries, which then go to landfill in the next cycle. (There
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There was a brief time when Chia farming was doable at home scale. I mined two chia just because I found the technology interesting. Then watched the network capacity increase at a disturbingly exponential rate, expanding so fast it started to impact global hard drive prices. Now, forget it.
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I need to go pick up more popcorn (Score:3)
I thought this week's street fighting between the antivaxers and the antifas was a hoot, but a battle between two competing imaginary asset schemes is even better, because by the time it's over billions of invested dollars are going to evaporate overnight.
They thought it was designed to be decentralized? (Score:2)
I don't think this change will affect that in the way they expect. It seems more likely to go the other way, as someone running a big server farm will be able to "stake" more than someone with an idl
Proof of Stake is a Ponzi scheme (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Asking in ignorance (Score:2)
If the system is based on proof of stake and the network decisions are approved by those stakes wouldn't that allow a small number of very large wallets to control it?
I.e. are they moving away from large mining firms having power to large wallets having power?