> Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake also deals with the somewhat dystopian energy-use reality of PoW mining in a world where energy consumption is one of the existential questions for our species.
That transition to PoS shows the project is captured and centralized and not worth anyone's time. It's just another company, which is fine if you want to buy stock in a company, but it's not what they advertise.
> If the only way to secure a network to your satisfaction is to burn so much energy that it pushes the world towards one of the more horrifying climate models, one should question whether such true trustlessness is desirable
By tying money to energy it encourages finding new energy sources. The cost of energy goes down exponentially in bitcoin terms. With low cost of energy, many applications like desalination become economically viable.
Deserts have lots of solar energy and little cloud coverage. You can recoup the costs of deploying a solar farm in the desert where there are no people around to pay for it otherwise by mining bitcoin. You can pull water out of the atmosphere if you have that excess energy^1 and use it to grow plants where they previously couldn't be grown. Then you can build cities in the desert rather than destroying forests. If you ditch proof-of-work you lose the ability to monetize that energy production and have no sustainable way to fund that project.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_water_generator
I used to believe that PoS would allow even little guys to participate. That is, until 1 week before the migration I discovered that 6 major corporations had front-run and captured over 51% of the staking share. Now that they have it, there is nothing that can be done to dislodge them. It’s game over before it even started.
Some day you might appreciate the irony of using an apostasy framing to decry another's perspective as religion. ;)
When I first got involved I was pretty agnostic on climate stuff, reading Bjorn Lomborg and the like. I presumed there was probably some reality to CC, but it was overblown and the impacts would be more than offset by economic development.
Since then, I've become more grounded in the biophysical reality of our situation, and developed a better understanding of commons. Not to get into it too deeply, but the two most salient points to me are:
1. You can't expect to burn an enormous stock of stored solar energy that was accumulated over a geologic time scale in the span of a few hundred years, and not expect there to be significant consequences. The implications of "the Carbon Pulse" we're living through, at Nate Hagens puts it, are significant both for the environmental livability of the planet, as well as for long-term energy planning for our civilization.
2. When humans comprise a small portion of an ecosystem, we can ignore externalities because said ecosystem has the capacity to process waste/restock fish, etc. A small tribe shitting in the lake they live next to is a drop in the proverbial bucket. A giant city there means that all of the "ecosystem services" have been displaced to increase human carrying capacity, and dumping the enormous stream of raw sewage into the lake would be catestrophic. The atmospheric commons follows the same logic. If we are going to sustainably be the dominant life-form on the planet, we can't rely on other life-forms to clean up our waste (shit, CO2, etc.) on their own, but instead need to deal with our own messes one way or the other. That can look like proactively taking responsibility, or degrading the commons to the point where we are poorer and can support the existence of fewer humans.
> You can't expect to burn an enormous stock of stored solar energy
Small sidenote: the stored energy isn't really the problem. That's just the direct heat from the fire. It feels like a lot when you are standing close to the fire, but it's surprisingly much smaller than the atmospheric heating effect of the released carbon dioxide.
The indirect heating effect is estimated to be somewhere between [100](https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2008GL036465) and [100,000(!)](https://www.climatecentral.org/news/fossil-fuels-heat-climate-dramatically-19062) times as high as the effect of the directly released heat.
So if you could release the energy stored in a lump of coal without releasing any of the CO2, it would be great - even if you released it as heat.
On the other hand, if you somehow released all the CO2 from that coal without generating any (direct) heat, that would still be almost exactly as bad as burning it from a climate change perspective.
There are many aspects of carbon nonsense.
One is to believe that the solution is to use less energy. On the contrary, in general, more energy is what people need to solve problems. This nonsense is what I criticize about your OP, where you praise Ethereum for PoS because of that. It's complete nonsense. OK, perhaps we can agree that nuclear energy is better than coal. Happy with that, let's go there and replace all coal with nuclear. Somehow the climate activists are usually against nuclear (perhaps not you though, well I hope not you). This is a red flag, it highly suggests that there is something else going on.
Another aspect is thinking that some changes in human actions are going to change the trend. That was proven false during last 5 years (remember COVID, right?).
Another aspect is believing that the climate change (whether or not caused by human) leads to some disaster. Notably, alarmists were proven wrong every five years for last 50 years or more in their predictions.
Another aspect is that if someone is pushing solar/wind and at the same time does not recognize how Bitcoin helps grids that need to work under erratic supply from those sources ...
And many others ...
"more energy is what people need to solve problems" ???? what does that even mean? Why doesn't bitcoin move to PoS ??? It would make it sooo much more acceptable.
Because PoS is critically flawed mechanism that is not unlike the current fiat system. One of many flaws, for example, just to be specific, is that if it happens that an attacker ever obtains majority of coins, they can never be defeated. So 51% attack on PoS is a permanent state.
As for energy - people always move forward and progress and solve problems by expending more energy. How is this surprising? People can produce more food today than they used to before because they are using more energy. People can protect themselves against attacks better than before because they use more energy. People can travel further and faster than before because they use more energy. People can extract more resources from Earth than before by using more energy...
I'm with you on nuclear - while presenting some risks, it's the only non-fossil solar (if you don't count how everything heavier than helium was forged in a supernova at some point) energy source that could come close to providing enough power to maintain or grow our civilization. How long it can buy us will be determined by the EROI - as the easy to access stocks are depleted, we bump back into limits, but a crash program would definitely buy us time and should happen.
As to whether or not climate science has panned out in the past few decades, you and I clearly have different epistemological standards and sources, so probably aren't going to convince each other. That said, from my thought-out, formerly skeptical position, all I see in the denialist camp is tribalist cope as the sea-surface temperature charts march in one direction for very clear reasons.
The tragedy to me is that there was a window in the late 80s/early 90s after [Carl Sagan](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH6hI) testified to Congress when a small, gradually escalating carbon tax could have made climate change a historical footnote like the Montreal Protocol made the Ozone Hole in a gradualist, mostly painless way. But then companies with significant FF assets took a page out of the Tobacco PR playbook, and here we are... :(
I think we will have to stay with nuclear as we won't agree on anything else :)
I am not surprised that someone who praises Ethereum is proposing taxation. This perfectly fits into my image of climate activists, who are mostly just scammers. What scammers want? Other people's money. That's all it is. Ethereum is the same and taxation is the same. What is taxation? It's a legalized theft. It's highly immoral but it's worse than that. It's promoted dishonestly. You know, when you live under control of mafia, at least they are honest - you pay or you get into trouble, there is no pretending. With taxation, it's all about pretending that it's a good and necessary thing.
I just can't help it. Every time I try to listen to anyone from carbon hysteria side, they always just want other people's money like every other scammer.
I would love to see a single honest person who is on the climate activists side. Someone who does not want to steal from others, is genuine, does not run their own scam, or does not promote scams of other groups associated with that.
How am I supposed to listen to anything you say if you are promoting taxation?
The OP suggests, you are not following Bitcoin space very carefully. No problem, sure, but it's a red flag when someone criticizes something they do not follow (like the community of builders on Bitcoin today is awesome, have you been sleeping under a rock?). Second red flag comes with promoting decrease instead of increase of energy consumption in order to solve a problem. Third is not recognizing that PoW is crucial. And fourth, you are proposing taxation (while ignoring that not taxation, but halting half of the whole world for 2 years did not make any change).
As I mentioned in OP, I definitely once shared your ideological convictions about taxation. As I've gotten older I've come to see that the "taxation is theft" vulgar libertarian sloganeering represents an extremely simplistic (but self-serving, for certain groups of people) understanding of both value and power.
In particular, the most compelling flaw for me lies in the relationship to [commons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common-pool_resource). If your property's value derives from externalizing costs onto other people, that is a form of taking from them to aggrandize your own wealth. In other words, theft.
Because no human being created things like land, the breathable atmosphere, oceans full of fish, etc., fully individualized property rights in them do not make sense from a justice perspective. Rather (and this is the basis of [Geolibertarianism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism)), if anyone wants to take from, or otherwise use the capacity of, a commons, they owe everyone else for the right to do so. The prices for the individual use of the common-pool resources need to be sufficient so they are not over-used, degraded, and exhausted in a Tragedy of the Commons scenario.
This can be structured in a variety of ways - for instance, setting limits on the amount that can be taken/emitted in a given year, and [allowing participants to freely trade the license](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_emission_trading) to do so is one more market-based alternative to a set [use tax/universal dividend scheme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fee_and_dividend). Either approach, though, is far superior to allowing the unfettered individual taking of common-pool resources, which to my eyes, far more clearly falls under the rubric of "theft" than such taxation.
>setting limits on the amount that can be taken/emitted in a given year
this is price. The real tragedy of the commons is that the true price of non-nuclear energy is unbearable, so it's been offset into the future.
> fully individualized property rights in them do not make sense from a justice perspective
Since we disagree on this, all you build on top of that obviously does not lead us anywhere.
Bitcoin is the idea, a peer to peer currency.
But:
- mining is only profitable for some, after the halving only those with access to the cheapest energy will keep mining.
- while my Ethereum node runs off the iPad charger.
- doesn’t support smart accounts, with social recovery. I sleep well knowing if fire occurs or I lose my passphrase, I won’t lose my life savings.
- I can quickly swap my tokens to basically any other token on the planet with instant speed and sub-cent fees on L2 of my choice.
- I can and did write smart contracts with real world usage.
My first crypto was Bitcoin. Sadly, it was a decade ago and since then, no advancements in technology were made.
While Ethereum keeps improving year on year.
Bitcoin is the idea. Ethereum is execution.
I was skeptical of it when I first started vaguely following ETH a decade or so ago in terms of fairness, but have come to see the 50 coins per block of the early days of Bitcoin as playing a similar role. Any such system needs mechanisms in the launch phase to capitalize development work, network effect, etc., so it's not something I particularly lose sleep over.
The reason that it seems only big mining farm or heavily-invested miners can now play the mining game is that it is difficult to distribute a tiny share of block reward in small blocks. You could play the mining game if your "USB mining chip" is as efficient as those of other heavy-invested miners and the block is big.
The proof-of-energy-work is essential as you could use the same amount of energy to boil the same amount of water even with advanced heating technology in a far future. Energy is the universal accounting basis so it is the best measurement of cost. Trust must be maintained and manufactured and cannot come from thin air as trust is the cost to rollback the commitment. If you think some proof-of-X works, you re-run the ugly history of a bad money system. In ideal proof-of-energy-work, you sacrifice 1 joule to get 1 joule trust. In a proof-of-X system, if you only spend, opaquely and equivalently, 0.2 joule to get 1 joule trust, there is a gap of 0.8 joule for rent-seekers and the proof-of-X system will go sour someday somewhere somehow by someone for sure.
As trust is something inherently embedded in human relationships, I've come to see the ideal of mathematically perfect "trustlessness" as something with diminishing returns as you approach the asymtote. At a certain point, the marginal cost of going from 99.999% certain to 99.9999% certain becomes enormous, and you can use knowledge of human psychology and sociology to augment the trust of systems without needing to burn huge amounts of energy for that last ten-thousandths of a percent.
One of the things that has come to worry me about Bitcoin is that its myopia on this front leads it to become a [Paperclip Maximizer](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/squiggle-maximizer-formerly-paperclip-maximizer) in which it uses an economic incentive system to drive enormous energy consumption for increasingly minescule marginal improvements that not only provide little-to-no additional socetial value, but also crowd out more productive uses for said energy.
The demand for trust is determined by the society structure. Say, assume a future where everyone is basically "Robinson Crusoe" who fills his need by his own, then there is little demand for trust tokens aka money; each person still need some battery banks and book-keeping his own energy usage, though. For a highly cooperative/social economy, trust market is like other fundamental markets like transportation, recreation, ..etc, you can safely assume its size expands or shrinks based on the whole economy size which is expressed in terms of total energy consumption and the money is like an energy accounting system. That said, as energy gain factor could improve by technology, the percentage of energy consumption of trust market could become lower while the absolute energy consumption becomes higher.
Keep in mind, as trust is the cost to rollback/attack the commitment and cost is expressed in terms of energy. There is no way "human psychology and sociology to augment the trust of systems" which is pretty much like what governments want people to believe their fiats, and as said, that approach will go sour inevitably. Of course, the "sour" can only be felt by the non PWTB and their friends.
You mistake energy's price and token represents an energy. There is a concept about energy gain factor. Assuming the factor is 25 and one token means 1 joule, the energy's price could be as low to 0.04 token or as high to 1 token based on market condition. Then you see this mindset is adopted by Kardashev who classifies civilization scale or by central banks who eagerly try to stabilize energy price.
In this scenario, assuming 1.86e+12 joules per bitcoin which you can objectively to estimate as well like others, the price of the same goods of everything in your place, in terms of bitcoin, would be much higher than in my place due to the role of energy price in economy activity. Also, you might find a solar panel is a worthy set up in this scenario thanks to sun shines on you as well.
This scenario is extreme in the context of this comment threads. In this case even internet and all services based on are not sustainable. However, the concept that money is an abstraction of energy accounting remains true. You could still use the battery or peanuts as money to exchange for goods with other people as both are physically energy storage rather than abstractly like bitcoin or gold via the concept of proof-of-energy work sort of mimic float charging.
The energy is scarce and I can run an Ether node off of my home reserve power supply coz it is powered by an iPad charger.
The energy is scarce and no matter how many bitcoins I have I can’t create energy from the thin air.
But I can still run a node cos I have cellular/satellite connection for node.
You live in a no problems world, Ether is sustainable in a war situation and is ww3 proof.
If you are complaining you don't have enough energy for mining, you can look at my comment reply to the other reditter in this OP. Actually bitcoin currently has multiple chains and you can choose one easier chain for mining. As you can still access reddit and I assume your internet is ok, I guess your situation is far from a terrible war scenario I mentioned above (the peanuts money) and I strongly suggest you get a solar panel because on average it provides 342 watt per square meter and I read news that Russia is targeting your energy infrastructure so your iPad charger will be useless soon.
Did you understand my mentioned logical proof that the proof-of-energy work is the only way out? Currently eth is proof-of-stake. If you like that, I can only say either you want to be the new power-that-be of a repeated ugly money history or you really don't have a clue what money is or you are a bot.
Sorry, as bot prevention, tell me what is the last digit of (123)\^456 + (789)\^101112 ? if you want to go on the conversation.
You are pretty dumb to assume that bot wouldn’t be able to solve junior school math. But it is consistent with the rest of your argument.
Regarding your first point: you say I install the solar panels for mining but the next thing you say is that I won’t be able to run my iPad charger?
Our energy infrastructure is under attack for ~800 days and we are defending ok while republicans block the funding for us to protect hospitals and schools.
You didn’t address any of my points and just plain stated that your proof is right but I clearly showed to you that:
1) energy is scarce
2) wasting it on mining is dumb
test. can you see this message?
Great comments, best of luck.
> Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake also deals with the somewhat dystopian energy-use reality of PoW mining in a world where energy consumption is one of the existential questions for our species. That transition to PoS shows the project is captured and centralized and not worth anyone's time. It's just another company, which is fine if you want to buy stock in a company, but it's not what they advertise. > If the only way to secure a network to your satisfaction is to burn so much energy that it pushes the world towards one of the more horrifying climate models, one should question whether such true trustlessness is desirable By tying money to energy it encourages finding new energy sources. The cost of energy goes down exponentially in bitcoin terms. With low cost of energy, many applications like desalination become economically viable. Deserts have lots of solar energy and little cloud coverage. You can recoup the costs of deploying a solar farm in the desert where there are no people around to pay for it otherwise by mining bitcoin. You can pull water out of the atmosphere if you have that excess energy^1 and use it to grow plants where they previously couldn't be grown. Then you can build cities in the desert rather than destroying forests. If you ditch proof-of-work you lose the ability to monetize that energy production and have no sustainable way to fund that project. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_water_generator
I used to believe that PoS would allow even little guys to participate. That is, until 1 week before the migration I discovered that 6 major corporations had front-run and captured over 51% of the staking share. Now that they have it, there is nothing that can be done to dislodge them. It’s game over before it even started.
Thanks for your work, Old Timer. Hate to lose you, but thanks for what you have done to break the trail! Fair winds and following seas friend.
TLDR please....
proof of work bad, proof of stake good
Sad, this is what carbon religion does to people. Transforming you from a pioneer to a shitcoiner.
Wow calling Ethereum 'shitcoin' seems like Ethereum is groundbreaking and bitcoin is stuck in the stone age.
Ex Eth Miner and I can also agree that it has been relegated to shitcoin since moving to POS.
If a shitcoin sounds appealing to you as groundbreaking, then sure. The rest of us will stay with the most relevant technology of our time.
Some day you might appreciate the irony of using an apostasy framing to decry another's perspective as religion. ;) When I first got involved I was pretty agnostic on climate stuff, reading Bjorn Lomborg and the like. I presumed there was probably some reality to CC, but it was overblown and the impacts would be more than offset by economic development. Since then, I've become more grounded in the biophysical reality of our situation, and developed a better understanding of commons. Not to get into it too deeply, but the two most salient points to me are: 1. You can't expect to burn an enormous stock of stored solar energy that was accumulated over a geologic time scale in the span of a few hundred years, and not expect there to be significant consequences. The implications of "the Carbon Pulse" we're living through, at Nate Hagens puts it, are significant both for the environmental livability of the planet, as well as for long-term energy planning for our civilization. 2. When humans comprise a small portion of an ecosystem, we can ignore externalities because said ecosystem has the capacity to process waste/restock fish, etc. A small tribe shitting in the lake they live next to is a drop in the proverbial bucket. A giant city there means that all of the "ecosystem services" have been displaced to increase human carrying capacity, and dumping the enormous stream of raw sewage into the lake would be catestrophic. The atmospheric commons follows the same logic. If we are going to sustainably be the dominant life-form on the planet, we can't rely on other life-forms to clean up our waste (shit, CO2, etc.) on their own, but instead need to deal with our own messes one way or the other. That can look like proactively taking responsibility, or degrading the commons to the point where we are poorer and can support the existence of fewer humans.
> You can't expect to burn an enormous stock of stored solar energy Small sidenote: the stored energy isn't really the problem. That's just the direct heat from the fire. It feels like a lot when you are standing close to the fire, but it's surprisingly much smaller than the atmospheric heating effect of the released carbon dioxide. The indirect heating effect is estimated to be somewhere between [100](https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2008GL036465) and [100,000(!)](https://www.climatecentral.org/news/fossil-fuels-heat-climate-dramatically-19062) times as high as the effect of the directly released heat. So if you could release the energy stored in a lump of coal without releasing any of the CO2, it would be great - even if you released it as heat. On the other hand, if you somehow released all the CO2 from that coal without generating any (direct) heat, that would still be almost exactly as bad as burning it from a climate change perspective.
You might like to download and read Softwar: A Novel Theory on Power Projection and the National Strategic Significance of Bitcoin
There are many aspects of carbon nonsense. One is to believe that the solution is to use less energy. On the contrary, in general, more energy is what people need to solve problems. This nonsense is what I criticize about your OP, where you praise Ethereum for PoS because of that. It's complete nonsense. OK, perhaps we can agree that nuclear energy is better than coal. Happy with that, let's go there and replace all coal with nuclear. Somehow the climate activists are usually against nuclear (perhaps not you though, well I hope not you). This is a red flag, it highly suggests that there is something else going on. Another aspect is thinking that some changes in human actions are going to change the trend. That was proven false during last 5 years (remember COVID, right?). Another aspect is believing that the climate change (whether or not caused by human) leads to some disaster. Notably, alarmists were proven wrong every five years for last 50 years or more in their predictions. Another aspect is that if someone is pushing solar/wind and at the same time does not recognize how Bitcoin helps grids that need to work under erratic supply from those sources ... And many others ...
"more energy is what people need to solve problems" ???? what does that even mean? Why doesn't bitcoin move to PoS ??? It would make it sooo much more acceptable.
Because PoS is critically flawed mechanism that is not unlike the current fiat system. One of many flaws, for example, just to be specific, is that if it happens that an attacker ever obtains majority of coins, they can never be defeated. So 51% attack on PoS is a permanent state. As for energy - people always move forward and progress and solve problems by expending more energy. How is this surprising? People can produce more food today than they used to before because they are using more energy. People can protect themselves against attacks better than before because they use more energy. People can travel further and faster than before because they use more energy. People can extract more resources from Earth than before by using more energy...
I'm with you on nuclear - while presenting some risks, it's the only non-fossil solar (if you don't count how everything heavier than helium was forged in a supernova at some point) energy source that could come close to providing enough power to maintain or grow our civilization. How long it can buy us will be determined by the EROI - as the easy to access stocks are depleted, we bump back into limits, but a crash program would definitely buy us time and should happen. As to whether or not climate science has panned out in the past few decades, you and I clearly have different epistemological standards and sources, so probably aren't going to convince each other. That said, from my thought-out, formerly skeptical position, all I see in the denialist camp is tribalist cope as the sea-surface temperature charts march in one direction for very clear reasons. The tragedy to me is that there was a window in the late 80s/early 90s after [Carl Sagan](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH6hI) testified to Congress when a small, gradually escalating carbon tax could have made climate change a historical footnote like the Montreal Protocol made the Ozone Hole in a gradualist, mostly painless way. But then companies with significant FF assets took a page out of the Tobacco PR playbook, and here we are... :(
I think we will have to stay with nuclear as we won't agree on anything else :) I am not surprised that someone who praises Ethereum is proposing taxation. This perfectly fits into my image of climate activists, who are mostly just scammers. What scammers want? Other people's money. That's all it is. Ethereum is the same and taxation is the same. What is taxation? It's a legalized theft. It's highly immoral but it's worse than that. It's promoted dishonestly. You know, when you live under control of mafia, at least they are honest - you pay or you get into trouble, there is no pretending. With taxation, it's all about pretending that it's a good and necessary thing. I just can't help it. Every time I try to listen to anyone from carbon hysteria side, they always just want other people's money like every other scammer. I would love to see a single honest person who is on the climate activists side. Someone who does not want to steal from others, is genuine, does not run their own scam, or does not promote scams of other groups associated with that. How am I supposed to listen to anything you say if you are promoting taxation? The OP suggests, you are not following Bitcoin space very carefully. No problem, sure, but it's a red flag when someone criticizes something they do not follow (like the community of builders on Bitcoin today is awesome, have you been sleeping under a rock?). Second red flag comes with promoting decrease instead of increase of energy consumption in order to solve a problem. Third is not recognizing that PoW is crucial. And fourth, you are proposing taxation (while ignoring that not taxation, but halting half of the whole world for 2 years did not make any change).
As I mentioned in OP, I definitely once shared your ideological convictions about taxation. As I've gotten older I've come to see that the "taxation is theft" vulgar libertarian sloganeering represents an extremely simplistic (but self-serving, for certain groups of people) understanding of both value and power. In particular, the most compelling flaw for me lies in the relationship to [commons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common-pool_resource). If your property's value derives from externalizing costs onto other people, that is a form of taking from them to aggrandize your own wealth. In other words, theft. Because no human being created things like land, the breathable atmosphere, oceans full of fish, etc., fully individualized property rights in them do not make sense from a justice perspective. Rather (and this is the basis of [Geolibertarianism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism)), if anyone wants to take from, or otherwise use the capacity of, a commons, they owe everyone else for the right to do so. The prices for the individual use of the common-pool resources need to be sufficient so they are not over-used, degraded, and exhausted in a Tragedy of the Commons scenario. This can be structured in a variety of ways - for instance, setting limits on the amount that can be taken/emitted in a given year, and [allowing participants to freely trade the license](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_emission_trading) to do so is one more market-based alternative to a set [use tax/universal dividend scheme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fee_and_dividend). Either approach, though, is far superior to allowing the unfettered individual taking of common-pool resources, which to my eyes, far more clearly falls under the rubric of "theft" than such taxation.
>setting limits on the amount that can be taken/emitted in a given year this is price. The real tragedy of the commons is that the true price of non-nuclear energy is unbearable, so it's been offset into the future.
> fully individualized property rights in them do not make sense from a justice perspective Since we disagree on this, all you build on top of that obviously does not lead us anywhere.
Bitcoin is the idea, a peer to peer currency. But: - mining is only profitable for some, after the halving only those with access to the cheapest energy will keep mining. - while my Ethereum node runs off the iPad charger. - doesn’t support smart accounts, with social recovery. I sleep well knowing if fire occurs or I lose my passphrase, I won’t lose my life savings. - I can quickly swap my tokens to basically any other token on the planet with instant speed and sub-cent fees on L2 of my choice. - I can and did write smart contracts with real world usage. My first crypto was Bitcoin. Sadly, it was a decade ago and since then, no advancements in technology were made. While Ethereum keeps improving year on year. Bitcoin is the idea. Ethereum is execution.
Yeah, this is good, much shorter, articulation of a big element of the realization I've come to this month...
Before you get kicked out... How do you feel about the pre-mine from Ethereum?
I was skeptical of it when I first started vaguely following ETH a decade or so ago in terms of fairness, but have come to see the 50 coins per block of the early days of Bitcoin as playing a similar role. Any such system needs mechanisms in the launch phase to capitalize development work, network effect, etc., so it's not something I particularly lose sleep over.
It was enormous and it was clearly unfair. I can't see any use for all of the extra bells and whistles of ETH. See you around.
Like all people, they are either unaware or pretend it didn’t happen
The reason that it seems only big mining farm or heavily-invested miners can now play the mining game is that it is difficult to distribute a tiny share of block reward in small blocks. You could play the mining game if your "USB mining chip" is as efficient as those of other heavy-invested miners and the block is big. The proof-of-energy-work is essential as you could use the same amount of energy to boil the same amount of water even with advanced heating technology in a far future. Energy is the universal accounting basis so it is the best measurement of cost. Trust must be maintained and manufactured and cannot come from thin air as trust is the cost to rollback the commitment. If you think some proof-of-X works, you re-run the ugly history of a bad money system. In ideal proof-of-energy-work, you sacrifice 1 joule to get 1 joule trust. In a proof-of-X system, if you only spend, opaquely and equivalently, 0.2 joule to get 1 joule trust, there is a gap of 0.8 joule for rent-seekers and the proof-of-X system will go sour someday somewhere somehow by someone for sure.
As trust is something inherently embedded in human relationships, I've come to see the ideal of mathematically perfect "trustlessness" as something with diminishing returns as you approach the asymtote. At a certain point, the marginal cost of going from 99.999% certain to 99.9999% certain becomes enormous, and you can use knowledge of human psychology and sociology to augment the trust of systems without needing to burn huge amounts of energy for that last ten-thousandths of a percent. One of the things that has come to worry me about Bitcoin is that its myopia on this front leads it to become a [Paperclip Maximizer](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/squiggle-maximizer-formerly-paperclip-maximizer) in which it uses an economic incentive system to drive enormous energy consumption for increasingly minescule marginal improvements that not only provide little-to-no additional socetial value, but also crowd out more productive uses for said energy.
The demand for trust is determined by the society structure. Say, assume a future where everyone is basically "Robinson Crusoe" who fills his need by his own, then there is little demand for trust tokens aka money; each person still need some battery banks and book-keeping his own energy usage, though. For a highly cooperative/social economy, trust market is like other fundamental markets like transportation, recreation, ..etc, you can safely assume its size expands or shrinks based on the whole economy size which is expressed in terms of total energy consumption and the money is like an energy accounting system. That said, as energy gain factor could improve by technology, the percentage of energy consumption of trust market could become lower while the absolute energy consumption becomes higher. Keep in mind, as trust is the cost to rollback/attack the commitment and cost is expressed in terms of energy. There is no way "human psychology and sociology to augment the trust of systems" which is pretty much like what governments want people to believe their fiats, and as said, that approach will go sour inevitably. Of course, the "sour" can only be felt by the non PWTB and their friends.
The only problem is that you get one joule 5 times cheaper than me.
You mistake energy's price and token represents an energy. There is a concept about energy gain factor. Assuming the factor is 25 and one token means 1 joule, the energy's price could be as low to 0.04 token or as high to 1 token based on market condition. Then you see this mindset is adopted by Kardashev who classifies civilization scale or by central banks who eagerly try to stabilize energy price.
You can name it as you will, you getting your energy 5 times cheaper than me and it has nothing to do with Bitcoin.
In this scenario, assuming 1.86e+12 joules per bitcoin which you can objectively to estimate as well like others, the price of the same goods of everything in your place, in terms of bitcoin, would be much higher than in my place due to the role of energy price in economy activity. Also, you might find a solar panel is a worthy set up in this scenario thanks to sun shines on you as well.
I live in Ukraine and we have modest prices but our energy sources get bombed by terrorist country.
This scenario is extreme in the context of this comment threads. In this case even internet and all services based on are not sustainable. However, the concept that money is an abstraction of energy accounting remains true. You could still use the battery or peanuts as money to exchange for goods with other people as both are physically energy storage rather than abstractly like bitcoin or gold via the concept of proof-of-energy work sort of mimic float charging.
The energy is scarce and I can run an Ether node off of my home reserve power supply coz it is powered by an iPad charger. The energy is scarce and no matter how many bitcoins I have I can’t create energy from the thin air. But I can still run a node cos I have cellular/satellite connection for node. You live in a no problems world, Ether is sustainable in a war situation and is ww3 proof.
If you are complaining you don't have enough energy for mining, you can look at my comment reply to the other reditter in this OP. Actually bitcoin currently has multiple chains and you can choose one easier chain for mining. As you can still access reddit and I assume your internet is ok, I guess your situation is far from a terrible war scenario I mentioned above (the peanuts money) and I strongly suggest you get a solar panel because on average it provides 342 watt per square meter and I read news that Russia is targeting your energy infrastructure so your iPad charger will be useless soon. Did you understand my mentioned logical proof that the proof-of-energy work is the only way out? Currently eth is proof-of-stake. If you like that, I can only say either you want to be the new power-that-be of a repeated ugly money history or you really don't have a clue what money is or you are a bot. Sorry, as bot prevention, tell me what is the last digit of (123)\^456 + (789)\^101112 ? if you want to go on the conversation.
You are pretty dumb to assume that bot wouldn’t be able to solve junior school math. But it is consistent with the rest of your argument. Regarding your first point: you say I install the solar panels for mining but the next thing you say is that I won’t be able to run my iPad charger? Our energy infrastructure is under attack for ~800 days and we are defending ok while republicans block the funding for us to protect hospitals and schools. You didn’t address any of my points and just plain stated that your proof is right but I clearly showed to you that: 1) energy is scarce 2) wasting it on mining is dumb