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from the a-step-in-the-right-direction dept.
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Ethereum Plans to Cut Its Absurd Energy Consumption by 99 Percent
Bitcoin soaks up most of the hype and the opprobrium heaped on cryptocurrencies, leaving its younger and smaller sibling Ethereum in the shadows. But Ethereum is anything but small. Its market capitalization was roughly US $10 billion at press time, and it has an equally whopping energy footprint.
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.
[...] Ethereum's plan is to replace PoW with proof of stake (PoS)—an alternative mechanism for distributed consensus that was first applied to a cryptocurrency with the launch of Peercoin in 2012. Instead of millions of processors simultaneously processing the same transactions, PoS randomly picks one to do the job.
In PoS, the participants are called validators instead of miners, and the key is keeping them honest. PoS does this by requiring each validator to put up a stake—a pile of ether in Ethereum's case—as collateral. A bigger stake earns a validator proportionately more chances at a turn, but it also means that a validator caught cheating has lots to lose.
Moving to PoS will cut the energy consumed per Ethereum transaction more than a hundredfold, according to Buterin: "The PoW part is the one that's consuming these huge amounts of electricity. The blockchain transactions themselves are not super computationally intensive. It's just verifying digital signatures. It's not some kind of heavy 3D-matrix map or machine learning on gigabytes of data," he says.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 03 2019, @04:44PM (12 children)
Proof of stake literally means people who have money automatically get more for doing nothing. This is just more scamming of people concerned about the poor/environment/etc.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by cosurgi on Friday January 04 2019, @12:31PM (11 children)
This is false:
"for doing nothing" is false because they have to keep running a full node to validate transactions and make sure that their node stays almost always online.
"people who have money" is false, because that is not enough. They must have not just "money", but they must have ETH, and they have to enter the PoS contract. Which fortunately is much easier than setting up a large mining farm, which "people who have LOTS of money" were doing earlier. So now the barrier of entrance is much lower, and this helps in decentralization.
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#\ @ ? [adom.de] Colonize Mars [kozicki.pl]
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(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Saturday January 05 2019, @12:44AM (10 children)
Last I looked the only way I'd be able to forge on ETH was if I joined a consortium to share the stake. No way I could field the stake on my own. The scale is completely different to a box with a few gpus.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday January 05 2019, @01:16AM (9 children)
Lots of people who mined on their GPU never received a bitcoin despite burning through lots of leccy. Same problem.
I return to the question of how PoS is less egalitarian than PoW, as originally asked, the answer to which was noticeably lacking in the immediate response.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Saturday January 05 2019, @07:55AM (8 children)
Well no, the obvious thing is that it becomes an exclusive club. You can't play unless you're already in the club. With PoW, anyone can mine, including *before* they have any coins on that chain.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday January 05 2019, @10:25AM (7 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Saturday January 05 2019, @11:03AM (6 children)
For some time it was profitable mining using a regular gaming GPU that one might already have for, you know, gaming :)
And I'm not following what you're saying about a QR code on a piece of paper - to forge on a PoS network you need to first have said stake, which unless you're on a network that's been PoW historically, you *have* to buy it. In the case of networks starting on PoS, that means buying some of the pre-mined coins. Great for the people who launch the coin, if they can attract the interest.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday January 05 2019, @11:23AM (5 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by cosurgi on Saturday January 05 2019, @12:17PM (2 children)
coolgopher's point about GPUs was valid between years 2009 and 2012. It is incorrect now.
QR code is not enough to mine using PoS. But still the barrier of entry is lower with PoS:
PoW:
+ must buy expensive specialized mining equipment
+ must setup a mining farm in place with cheap electricity
+ must connect to a mining pool (destroys decentralization), or run a standalone node (chances of mining anything are close to zero)
+ attack requires 51% of mining power, there is no penalty (your mining farm will not burn down to the ground)
PoS:
+ must buy at least 32 ETH (comparable to a price of a couple of GPUs, much cheaper than specialized mining equipment)
+ must run a standalone node (helps decentralization), or join a staking pool (destroys decentralization) - but only if 32 ETH is too expensive for you then this staking pool will help you.
+ attack requires 34% of staking power, there is penalty (the entire attacker's funds in ETH will be destroyed)
The most important point is that dozens of regular folks will be encouraged to run their own nodes, and this will massively help in decentralization. Which in turn will protect against network attacks. Convincing (or hacking) one or two mining pools to attack the network is much easier than doing the same to 10'000 miners scattered all around the globe.
So I think that's it.
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#\ @ ? [adom.de] Colonize Mars [kozicki.pl]
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(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday January 06 2019, @12:21PM (1 child)
> + must buy at least 32 ETH
NO!
You are conflating a system with one single implementation of such a system.
I can play that game:
Democracy:
Put Trump in power.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by cosurgi on Monday January 07 2019, @10:22AM
TFA was focusing on Constantinople fork. So I followed.
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#\ @ ? [adom.de] Colonize Mars [kozicki.pl]
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(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Saturday January 05 2019, @02:18PM (1 child)
Ah, wallet keys and addresses, for sure. Actually getting funds into them is another matter :)
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday January 06 2019, @12:23PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves