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Ethereum Plans To Cut Its Absurd Energy Consumption By 99 Percent (ieee.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Ethereum mining consumes a quarter to half of what Bitcoin mining does, but that still means that for most of 2018 it was using roughly as much electricity as Iceland. Indeed, the typical Ethereum transaction gobbles more power than an average U.S. household uses in a day. "That's just a huge waste of resources, even if you don't believe that pollution and carbon dioxide are an issue. There are real consumers -- real people -- whose need for electricity is being displaced by this stuff," says Vitalik Buterin, the 24-year-old Russian-Canadian computer scientist who invented Ethereum when he was just 18.
Buterin plans to finally start undoing his brainchild's energy waste in 2019. This year Buterin, the Ethereum Foundation he cofounded, and the broader open-source movement advancing the cryptocurrency all plan to field-test a long-promised overhaul of Ethereum's code. If these developers are right, by the end of 2019 Ethereum's new code could complete transactions using just 1 percent of the energy consumed today.
Buterin plans to finally start undoing his brainchild's energy waste in 2019. This year Buterin, the Ethereum Foundation he cofounded, and the broader open-source movement advancing the cryptocurrency all plan to field-test a long-promised overhaul of Ethereum's code. If these developers are right, by the end of 2019 Ethereum's new code could complete transactions using just 1 percent of the energy consumed today.
Now that we can produce more with less energy. Bring on currency inflation.
Is this going to make it easier to mine, or is it only going to help with transactions? I though that the majority of energy was in the process of trying to mine the next coin, not verifying transactions. Would this be akin to saying we are going to cut energy consumption by using lower-resistance power lines?
keyword: SHIT
Ban all cryptocurrency mining and transactions. Seriously. It is beyond insane that we, the human race, allow this idiocy to continue.
>Even if Trumptards think there's infinite coal in the ground and limited resources don't exist
Unlike Ethereum, which currently has no cap and can be mined infinitely.
It's a good point to make, digital currencies aren't really well-tethered in 3d meatspace rules except for the power they use to be computed. If they ran on 100% renewable energy there'd be no physical limitations, only computational ones.
Regulation is needed to prevent wasteful consumption of energy. Not only does the energy use exacerbate climate change, but the infrastructure costs to generate the necessary electricity get passed along to everyone through higher fees and taxes. Some also drive up costs of useful goods like GPUs, harming consumers who would otherwise use them for more productive purposes. Cryptocurrency produces no tangible value of its own, such as a useful good or service. It's far less efficient than centralized transaction processing systems, and offers no fraud protection to its users. It's far costlier and provides far less value. Regulators should give cryptocurrencies a choice: voluntarily curb your resource use dramatically or effectively be banned. I propose taxing all Bitcoin transactions and capital gains at 1000% until the energy consumption is brought within reasonable levels.
As the Kardashians are famous for being famous, crypto currencies are currencies cuz they're crypto.
Fixing the power problem doesn't solve the problem with crypto currency adoption. The main issue is that it's not for all debts, public and private.
And how will they stop the inevitable fork that will occur when the miners invested in the current PoW don't want to go along with this change? The thinking sounds like they'll try to avoid this by doing it gradually, but don't really know if it'll work.
It's very difficult to change things that people have vested, financial interests in.
Its energy consumption will be cut to zero organically, through lack of usefulness.
Until the yellow horde hyperinflate etherium
People should learn how much electrical power the world uses before thinking Etherium consumption is anything at all. Hint, it's not, it doesn't matter.
Or to be exact, it is 0.00007575757 of the global total. Yeah math and relative magnitude are hard, around here.
99% reduction in energy demand? Doesn't that mean 99% reduction in required workload and thus either a 99% reduction in the core value of the coin or more likely a 10000% factor increase in the number of people who now have an interest in your new super cheap to mine coin?
Liberalism is a disease worse than cancer.
Hanging around here you must already have a terminal infection so drop dead.
Obviously you don't if you think the coin is actually "mined" by processing the blockchain transaction ledger. It was a small correction but you've proven you can't accept being wrong and instead double down twattishly.
Learn how to accept correction in 2019, or be a cunt for life, I don't really care what you do or pretend to.
You don't understand the units you're using if you say it doesn't matter, that's just moronic. No wonder you aren't at work right now. Nothing you think or say will affect this in even the slightest way. You do not matter.
I think it's pretty obvious who's going to be a cunt for life, and it's you!
I don't mind a bit if you think I'm a cunt for correcting you on the minor point. You proved my point, you didn't know everything about this even though you pretend to for whatever reason. Hey, tapdance all you like. It's a free country.
As you still can't take correction, you are destined to be not only a cunt for life, but an incorrect cunt. Slightly worse than just your latent personality flaw, you're anti-information where it threatens your ego.
It's going to be a hard life for you.
1849. Repeat history, and not learn from it. Again. Make 'murika Stupider. Again.
Correction means you say how it actually is. You haven't corrected anything.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Actually you haven't accepted it, but it's pretty obvious you were wrong and doubled down, and are trying to salvage your ego here for whatever internal reason.
they and myself included will start advocating it all be made illegal cause you driving up my costs to do: pay bills like electricity as mining take sup so much and drive sup energy costs, buy pc gf cards and ram that these fuckers buy in bulk like one canuck whom bought 64000 cards in one go....what good is freedom of speech etc when you cant eat nor have a place to live....or do anything affordable online?
First the alcoholic needs to sober up, and only then can he or she look for an actual job. Cutting outrageous over-consumption by 99% is a starting point, not a finish line.
Person 1: You're useless and unreliable.
Person 2: Oh yeah? Well, I used to be shitfaced all day long.
Person 1: My bad. I misjudged you. Next drink's on me.
It's absolutely clear that using natural resources to do nothing (such as creating a fictional currency and tricking people into believing it is real) should be illegal around the globe. What the fuck is wrong with us, as a species, that any one of us is is stupid enough, or a big enough piece of shit, to do this?
Obviously you can't admit you don't know how it works, but it doesn't mine the coin by verifying the transaction ledger. #You can admit this or not, it changes nothing. #Trump-like
I believed that heavy crypto was a requirement to make transaction difficult to forge. Am I wrong? Or do they lower security? Or did they set the bar much too high in the first place so that they can slash 99% without consequence?
Ethereum will still be 99% more wasteful than Nano. Its entire network can apparently run on a single windmill.
The average transaction fee for an ETH transaction is pennies or less. If that transaction is consuming as much electricity as an average household does in a day, then why aren't we powering houses with all this insanely cheap energy the Ethereum users seem so able to find?
The energy is transformed into heat. So the consequence is that crypto currency mining should be moved into devices that are supposed to generate heat from electricity. Got an electric heater? a toaster? a hair dryer? a tumbler? a stove or oven? an electric kettle? a boiler or flow heater? a waffle, clothes, or soldering iron? ... All these devices should mine crypto coins while doing their work!!!
My flow heater "wastes" 18kW at maximum setting. Just think how neat it would be to instead have a water cooled server rack of 190 Core i7 8086K hexacore processors earning money while I'm under the shower.
"If these developers are right, by the end of 2019 Ethereum's new code could complete transactions using just 1 percent of the energy consumed today." - Even if they're off by 10% or 20% that's still fucking remarkable. Good for them.
That's only the transaction cost though. The main cost is mining and that will be the same as before.
No sig today...
So while Ethereum might produce more efficient code to reduce the per transaction waste, the overall effect of making each transaction so much cheaper could simply be to make transactions more attractive by a greater amount.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Obviously you can't admit you don't know how it works, but it doesn't mine the coin by verifying the transaction ledger. #You can admit this or not, it changes nothing. #Trump-like
Dude. All you've done is name call and tell someone they are wrong (while they are actually correct) for 20 replies. Either educate us all with your greatness (you can't) or go away (you can and should).
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
For those that like to drill down into the meat of the matter, you should read this threaded tweetstorm:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1078682801954799617.html
Proof-of-Stake is flawed -- https://medium.com/@hugonguyen/proof-of-stake-the-wrong-engineering-mindset-15e641ab65a2
ETH devs have been begging people not to deploy new distributed apps, because ETH has failed in its design promises. Vitalik himself is "backing away" from being the head of the project, because he has creeping doubts about this lauded "upgrade" succeeding. PoS requires trust, PoW does not. There is no free lunch.
No doubt the ETH boosters and pumpers will flood the comments with their chatterings, but even a peer-reivewed paper of the upgrade failed to produce scaling benefits -- https://medium.com/@muneeb/peer-review-cbc-casper-30840a98c89a
* Salient points:
* Casper is not theoretically sound or practical for fault tolerance.
* Casper does not provide any meaningful safety guarantees for blockchains.
* Casper doesn't seem to provide any clear scaling advantages.
Yet they're going go do it anyway. Sounds like the makings of a Grade-A clusterf**k to me.
With all the problems and censorship with traditional banking we better be grateful that there's an actual alternative. You've only lived in the current world so you don't know any better but there is better. Financial freedom is not inside the current banking system.
You are comparing with the cost of mining facilities in crypto. The energy spent every 10 min to produce a bitcoin block.
To compare the system that make traditional finance to work vs the system that make crypto finance to work you need to count the bank buildings, security costs, money transports, EVERYTHING. All the electricity and fuel needed to power those things. All the manpower spent answering support calls and so forth. THAT is the actual cost of the traditional monetary system vs the cost of crypto system.
Bitcoin kicks that traditional system's saggy butt in terms of wastefulness.
The mining is being subsidized by the creation of new tokens, which are then given to the "winning" miner.
That is to say, even people who just have their tokens sitting around, not being used in any transaction, or actually helping to pay the miners by virtue of the fact that they are losing purchasing power and the miners are gaining purchasing power—in the same way that every holder of U.S. dollars is continuously transferring a little bit of their purchasing power to the Federal Reserve (and then to the banking system or U.S. government) whenever the Federal Reserve "prints" new money.