
Ethereum Plans to Cut Its Energy Consumption by 99 Percent - sohkamyung
https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/ethereum-plans-to-cut-its-absurd-energy-consumption-by-99-percent
======
amasad
> _To make their intentions clear, Ethereum’s core developers reprogrammed
> their PoW code to create an exponential rise in mining difficulty. Known as
> the “Difficulty Bomb,” it began slowing the creation of new transaction
> blocks in late 2016 and was expected to bring ether mining to a grinding
> halt a few years thereafter._

> _This time bomb has, however, functioned more like an alarm clock with a
> snooze button. In October 2017, when mining time had already nearly doubled
> to 30 seconds, the Ethereum team reset the clock, delaying PoW’s doomsday by
> about 12 months. And they will likely hit snooze again shortly. How can
> Ethereum be decentralized if they can so easily keep changing it?_

> _In June, they decided to make a clean break and to build an entirely new
> blockchain—one that operates solely via PoS._

How can Ethereum be decentralized if they can so easily keep changing it?

I'm a total dilettante in crypto but if something is decentralized you can't
make large-scale changes to it at the drop of a hat.

Imagine how much coordination effort it takes to change TCP/IP or HTTP.

~~~
zanny
> How can Ethereum be decentralized if they can so easily keep changing it?

The development of crypto has really demonstrated an institutional inertia to
moving away from the blessed official implementation. Tons of BTC forks were
tried and failed, and almost all coins die when development stops than see
their clients forked.

A lot of it, I imagine, has to do with... _trust_. That magical thing crypto
users keep trying to keep decentralized. But when development of the currency
is centralized... and at the end of the day, _someone_ is the owner of the git
repo... you can't decentralize the implementation of the currency.

So what we see instead is enthusiasts putting their faith and trust in the
sense of the developers of their chosen coin pretty much to the bitter end.
You can fork these currencies - like Bitcoin Cash succeeded in doing for the
most part - but you won't steal their mindshare or userbase to any major
degree. They will stick to the original client or see that particular chain
abandoned entirely.

Doge and so many other coins died to negligent or exploitative developers and
whomever that someone is thats proposing to take over is an unknown, at least
less trusted quantity. So most would jump ship than take the chance, so coins
either stay under one development process or die completely with no real
middle ground.

~~~
opnitro
[https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm](https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm)
This paper is ever important when trying to come up with technical solutions
to societal organization.

~~~
StavrosK
Oh this is the article about feminist organizations? Yes, that was a fantastic
read, and I always use it when I want to argue against flat organizations,
it's very compelling.

------
chrispeel
Proof-of-Stake is indeed a good thing, and a worthy focus of the article.

From the article we read " _the long-term hope is that apps built from them
will eventually make Ethereum the ultimate cloud-computing platform._ "
Ethereum does not claim to be a computing platform in the same way that AWS
is; it's for low-complexity business logic only. I think it's misleading to
use "ultimate cloud-computing platform" to describe Ethereum.

~~~
r32a_
Ethereum claims to be the "World Computer" that lets you build "Unstoppable
Applications". If that doesn't sound like an AWS competitor then I don't know.

~~~
plywoodtrees
Sure, it's in some sense "an AWS competitor" but something like a billion
times less efficient, measured by throughput, energy efficiency, or cost. So,
in practice, no it's not.

~~~
ENGNR
AWS actually made an interesting product, a distributed ledger that's
'trustless' as long as you trust Amazon, but with none of the overhead of
blockchain so at least it's efficient

I think Ethereum is going big places, but the AWS ledger solution is probably
also going to be good for smaller industries where competitors don't trust
each other, they want a database that's shared, and they all might trust
Amazon enough to control it (eg if they're all using AWS anyway)

([https://aws.amazon.com/qldb/](https://aws.amazon.com/qldb/))

~~~
runeks
> […] a distributed ledger that's 'trustless' as long as you trust Amazon […]

This has been possible since the 80’s due to public key encryption.

It’s _not_ having to trust a central actor that’s the innovation behind e.g.
Bitcoin.

------
mabbo
I want to write a snarky or skeptical comment about how it's probably going to
fail, but honestly I kind of love the way Proof of Stake works.

Instead of mining, those who want in put down a stake of ether that they can
mine it and get a better chance of winning based on the size of the stake. If
they get caught cheating, they lose their stake. There probably going to be
some fun when the first serious exploits happen (oh shoot, what happens if
someone does [whatever]?) but I think the premise is solid enough that it's
worth trying.

I do still have serious concerns over things like the DAO hard fork and the
expectation that non-expert developers can or should be writing smart
contracts, etc. Ethereum isn't perfect. But if they can provide the same
service without the need for mining, all the power to them.

~~~
xorcist
> If they get caught cheating, they lose their stake

in _that_ _chain_. In any distributed blockchain there's going to be several
chain(tips) at any given time.

~~~
DennisP
Issuing staking transactions on more than one chain is one of the defined
slashing conditions. All the transactions are public so any other staker can
see that you've done it, submit the evidence in a transaction of their own,
and earn a reward while causing some or all of your stake to be destroyed.

("Some or all" because the devs recognize that you might get hacked, so the
penalty depends on how much of the total stake misbehaves at once. If it's
only a small portion, it's not damaging and presumed to be accidental.)

~~~
runeks
What if the misbehaving actor refuses to extend the chain that includes
evidence of its own cheating?

Ie. the cheater just extends the chain at one block before the block that
contains evidence of the cheating.

How will clients agree to use the chain that contains the cheating proof, and
not the other — just as valid — chain?

------
amasad
Some good criticism of PoS in @TuurDemeester's thread from last week:
[https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1078682801954799617.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1078682801954799617.html)

And HN discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18780489](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18780489)

~~~
wslh
Nothing in Tuur Demeester resume [1] makes me think he is able to discuss PoS
which is being developed by top scientists (including one Turing Prize) in
projects like Cardano, DFINITY, Algorand, and Ethereum.

[1]
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/tuurdemeester/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/tuurdemeester/)

~~~
josu
PoS is not only a computing and cryptography problem, it's also a social
science and game theory problem. There are not that many "scientists" that are
knowledgeable on those areas. Nick Szabo (the authority figure you may be
looking for) doesn't seem to like PoS:

>Conjectured governance under proof-of-stake seems to involve programmers &
other amateurs making legal & accounting decisions. Bitcoin governance does
not. Even when lawyers & accountants properly take over PoS governance, PoW
governance will likely be far more socially scalable.

[https://twitter.com/nickszabo4/status/956461360161935361](https://twitter.com/nickszabo4/status/956461360161935361)

Tuur is a pretty insightful guy, and even if he doesn't have the credentials,
the critique stands on its own.

~~~
wslh
Not saying that Tuur doesn't have the right to criticize. Saying that at the
end this discussion has a strong academic side where you can formalize the
problems involved, the adversarial attacks, and balance the solutions. Non
academic fights on strongly academic topics, in general, cannot distill the
signal from the noise.

------
jillesvangurp
I'm glad we switched away from Ethereum in favor of Stellar; it will take most
of this year and probably next for the dust to settle on this.

Until then, Ethereum continues to be unusable for serious dapps (which are
rare to begin with) that have expectations that exceed having reasonable
transaction throughput (<4/s, globally, for everyone) and latencies (minutes
to hours).

Until then, this is a toy platform for wannabe ICOs, misc gambling
applications, and not much else that I would qualify as substantial in
transaction volume or user base. I

f your use case is "nobody does anything that requires a transaction to happen
more often than maybe once a day and you can justify the high tranaction
cost", ethereum is for you. Otherwise if say, you expect to have users that do
stuff in your platform, use something else that works right now instead of
waiting for the next two years for Vitalik et. al to actually deliver on their
promises with something that is usable, scalable, stable, secure, and
available.

We switched to Stellar, which also implements proof of stake and provides a
reasonable compromise between security and availability. It has its own
challenges but transactions clear in <4s and there are dozens to hundreds of
them per minute globablly. It also skips the convoluted smart contracts (which
IMHO are severely expensive, hard to fix, exploitable bugs waiting to happen)
in favor of simple but adequate financial constructs builtin to stellar for
custom assets, transactions with multiple signees, transactions with limited
time validity and many other features that you can combine to emulate many of
the more things people attempt to do on top of solidity. E.g. you can do
escrow transactions, payment channels, and many other things. It also scales
down reasonably well for micro transactions with values measured in a
percentage of a cent (though payment channels are probably the way to go for
that).

~~~
wslh
The Stellar protocol has not been yet peer reviewed. Not saying that is wrong
but I would say that when you start relaxing consensus assumptions you can
come up with even simpler protocols. For example, using trusted third parties
to timestamp your transactions. In this way you solve the ordering issue in
consensus (assuming no timestamp can give the same time). For example, imagine
if Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and companies from other countries provides this
(Microsoft has a timestamp server for creating code certificates).

~~~
akerro
>For example, imagine if Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and companies from other
countries provides this (Microsoft has a timestamp server for creating code
certificates).

Sooo... paypal on blockchain?

~~~
wslh
No, saying that you can rely on third parties just for the timestamp but not
for the whole blockchain

------
superkuh
Proof of stake isn't a tested and reliable mechanism to achieve distributed
consensus. It'll be interesting to see what happens to a real cryptocurrency
that tries switching to an entirely new form of consensus.

~~~
RealityVoid
It is, and exactly these kind of experiments are what crypto cryptocurrencies
should be about.

~~~
anthonybsd
That's not true. Pure, non hybrid PoS has never been deployed on any crypto at
scale. The fact that Ethereum is on their 3rd iteration and still can't figure
out how to make it work years after promised delivery should be alarming at
least.

~~~
hanniabu
That's incorrect. There are plenty of chains with pure PoS, and the reason
it's taking Ethereum so long is because they have an established PoW chain
that they are trying to seamlessly transition to PoS. At the same time they
are also working on taking into consideration more aspects like how it works
with their platform/smart contracts and sharding. I'm sure there's many other
considerations I'm not aware of as well. All other pure PoS implementations
are much simpler as they're just simple payment blockchains which greatly
reduces the difficulties and moving parts.

~~~
collincusce
I haven't seen a pure PoS chain and I'm pretty heavy in the space. I HAVE seen
a LOT of dPoS chains, which isn't the same.

~~~
hanniabu
Off the top of my head there's PIVX and Blocknet.

~~~
collincusce
Neither of which are pure PoS.

------
corv
Proof of Stake is unable to deal with network partitions, the likes of which
every so often happen to cut entire countries off the Internet

PoS is a disaster waiting to happen for Ethereum.

~~~
dahdum
The stakers will lose their stake, and those shards affected will go offline,
but the rest of the network will continue on until the interruption is over.

Ethereum is designing the system specifically to accommodate that sort of
problem, last I remember you needed 95%+ uptime to generate return, so if your
internet goes out 5% of the time you should not stake.

~~~
wmf
Why would the minority side of the partition go offline? How would it even
know that it's on the minority side of a partition?

~~~
stale2002
> How would it even know that it's on the minority side of a partition?

Because it would be obvious?

The world does not exist in a state where a "true" network partition can ever
happen.

A "true" network partition I would define as preventing all information, of
any type, from going into and out of a country.

This is a ridiculous scenario that isn't even worth considering.

------
lrvick
Could also be 100% if their Proof-Of-Stake game theory does not work as well
with real funds worth stealing as it does on testnet. Full disclosure I hold
some ETH but I would not dare put all my eggs in that brazenly "do it live"
basket.

One party can hold >50% of all funds and we would have no way of knowing.

I wish people would look at less energy consuming proofs of work that still
allow us real world evidence of decentralization.

We need more experiments like Chia with proof of wasted disk space instead of
proof of wasted electricity.

~~~
mulmen
I'm confused as to the purpose of ETH. On one hand it sounds like an
investment that you can "hold" as you say. On the other it is a computing
platform. So what is it you "hold"? Compute resources? Why is it valuable to
allow speculation on compute resources? Can a person ever really reason about
the cost of a system running on ETH? How do you plan for those costs?

Is is a compute platform? A cryptocurrency? Something else? Both?

~~~
rhlsthrm
ETH is what you use to pay fees to the network to transact on it. i.e. if I
want to transfer you some "tokens" on the Ethereum platform, I would have to
pay a fee in ETH. This makes it a speculative investment, since if more people
want to use the network, there is more demand for ETH as a currency. Since
there is not an unlimited supply of it, there is a supply-demand dynamic on
ETH as a currency.

------
RexetBlell
Check out the Proof of Stake FAQ by the Ethereum team that addresses many of
the concerns in this thread: [https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-
Stake-FAQs](https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQs)

------
FollowSteph3
We’re cobstantly dealing with environmental issues and global warming yet burn
incredible amounts of energy and carbon compared to the value this gives us.
It would probably be more environmentally friendly to not use crypto
currencies then to stop using all the electricity you do each day...

~~~
wmf
_incredible amounts of energy compared to the value this gives us_

Note that the value of ETH is higher than the value of the energy needed to
mine it; that's why people mine. So is your complaint really about mispricing
of energy (externalities) or about other people having different values than
you?

~~~
wpietri
Well, the _price_ of ETH is higher than the _price_ of the energy needed to
mine it. The energy consumed has demonstrable value, but that's yet not true
for ETH. As many people have said here, it's experimental. And of course,
there's a fair bit of financial speculation going on. But as far as I know,
it's generating no significant value on its own.

~~~
tudorconstantin
What does it even mean "demonstrable value"?

If a person is willing to spend money (for energy, or for buying crypto on an
exchange), we can say crypto has "demonstrable value" for that person, no
matter what they want to do with that crypto.

~~~
softawre
Does it have value to society? That is the question. Of course it has value to
people if they are willing to pay for it.

~~~
wpietri
I think something only has value to people if they purchase it repeatedly and
end up satisfied with the outcome over the relevant time scale. People pay for
speeding tickets, but nobody's very excited about them. You can ask many ex-
smokers (and any emphysema patient) about the value of cigarettes. And as a
kid I had to learn a lesson about ordering stuff advertised in comic books; I
was willing to pay, but often didn't receive value.

------
rocqua
How does time work in a POS system?

In POW, the block time is a result of the difficulty, which relies on very low
accuracy time-stamps for blocks. Yet, with POS it seems to me I can 'mine' a
block at any given moment. Thus, what determines the 'block time' in POS?

If the 'block time' gets to be too fast, then the size of the blockchain is
going to be quite large.

------
h1d
I wonder but what had Ethereum achieved exactly to this day?

Are they starting to optimize before reaching to some practical state?

If the power consumption is out of hand when its usefulness is not, then
investors are putting too much money in it.

~~~
marcosdumay
They are pivoting into something that may be more useful. Mining is the
bottleneck on bitcoin usefulness.

ETH will have both different usage scenarios an one less bottleneck. (No idea
if this is enough.)

~~~
wmf
_Mining is the bottleneck on bitcoin usefulness._

Can you elaborate? If you want to use Bitcoin, just buy it. Mining seems more
complex to me (and more expensive since I don't have a hydro dam in my
backyard).

~~~
iSnow
Every transaction in BTC is secured by miners - that's the whole reason mining
exists in the first place. If you buy it and transfer it to your wallet, some
miner mines that transaction into a block (and gets rewarded for that).

------
NoblePublius
I’m skeptical of any reporting that refers to a crypto asset’s “market cap,”
as if there was enough liquidiy somewhere in the system for all HODLrs to exit
at anywhere near that price.

~~~
samatman
This is special pleading; there is no stock, no matter how blue chip, for
which the market cap reflects the price at which all 'hodlers' could
simultaneously sell their position.

That's just... not how markets work, at all.

~~~
Dylan16807
The idea of _everyone_ with a stock exiting simultaneously is way too
suspicious and hard to mentally model, so let's say a supermajority instead,
because some event makes a big holder and some followers want to move out.
Perhaps the stock was replaced in an index fund.

And you made up "simultaneously", so I'm going to ignore that and say "a week
or two" instead.

There are thousands of major stocks that could support this with a small price
movement.

If any big crypto coin had supermajority (or even 10%) of the owners try to
cash out, the money would dry up right away.

~~~
sobani
Apple had an eventful day yesterday (dropped by 10%). Despite that, the amount
of shares traded (this includes day trades) was only ~90M, on a total shares
outstanding of 5000M, so less than 2%.

From these figures I find it hard to imagine being able to sell 50% of all
shares within two weeks on top of all the normal trades that will also keep
occurring in that time.

I will give you that the major stocks have more liquidity and can take a
bigger selloff % wise than even Bitcoin or Ethereum.

~~~
Dylan16807
Price movement and number of shares traded are not very correlated. 2% of
shares changing hands might come with a 10% price swing, or it might come with
a 0% price swing.

When a stock leaves the S&P 500 you can have people selling off a double digit
percent of ownership, but once the process is over prices tend to be quite
close to where they started. And that's despite the implication that it's a
bad stock.

If someone has a plausible reason to buy or sell a huge amount of stock, that
isn't related to the company itself, counterparties will show up. If you offer
a stock at a 10% discount for purely personal reasons, there will be many many
buyers.

And as billmalarky said, in a merger you can have all the shares changing
hands with only a small price shift.

------
zby
I don't care much if the waste is in energy or hardware or in any other
resource. And the level of waste depends only on the block reward and the
price of ETH, not the algorithm used, because as long as it is profitable
people will burn resources to get the rewards. In free competition people will
do that until it gets unprofitable and it gets unprofitable when they burn as
much value as they get from the reward. This is MC=MR argument - first
presented in: [http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-
cheapest/](http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/) . I believe it is
possible that PoS is still more efficient than PoW - by being more secure with
the same block reward: [https://medium.com/@zby/proof-of-stake-can-be-cheaper-
than-p...](https://medium.com/@zby/proof-of-stake-can-be-cheaper-than-proof-
of-work-da14223a965) , but still the main point holds: the waste depends on
the reward not the algo.

~~~
DennisP
Yes but the waste in PoS is just the opportunity cost of locking up capital,
not anything physical.

Your first link argues that the cost is still physical because of stake
grinding, but there are solutions to stake grinding.

~~~
keymone
> opportunity cost of locking up capital

that's one part and it is also paid by PoW miners by buying the hardware.

then there is another part - block rewards. where's MC=MR int hat for PoS?

> solutions to stake grinding

only ones that involve trusted third parties.

~~~
DennisP
So the basic idea of stake grinding is that by trying lots of different
things, the staker can increase his odds of being the one to create a new
block.

This can be prevented without trusted third parties if you have a
collaborative way to generate random numbers, which cannot be manipulated by
the stakers. For example, in Dfinity they use threshold signatures. If any m
of n stakers submit their part of the signature, a random number is created;
no smaller subset of stakers can predict what that number will be, and the
number is the same regardless of which stakers submit. (The number is used to
choose the staker who produces the block.)

A similar attack is to sign multiple histories, so regardless of which is
accepted, you get some reward. In Ethereum, if you do this then you're
penalized, losing some or all of your stake (depending on size of the attack).
Any staker can see the evidence that you signed conflicting histories, and
submit the evidence to the winning chain, receiving a small reward for doing
so and destroying your stake.

~~~
keymone
> If any m of n stakers submit their part of the signature, a random number is
> created; no smaller subset of stakers can predict what that number will be,
> and the number is the same regardless of which stakers submit.

so the number is known just from who is participating in the scheme? who
controls the `n`?

> Any staker can see the evidence that you signed conflicting histories

what if there is a temporary network split? everybody who signed on chain A is
now malicious actor if they sign on chain B and vice versa.

~~~
DennisP
The number isn't known until all m submit their signatures. I think n is a
protocol parameter, so the community will decide by the software they agree to
run.

If you sign conflicting blocks you get penalized, but "conflicting" is tightly
defined. E.g. signing two different blocks at the same block height is a
conflict. That's not something you can do if you're on one side of a network
split, and it's certainly something you can avoid doing.

~~~
keymone
> signing two different blocks at the same block height is a conflict

i don't need to sign at same height to be a participant in an attack.

~~~
DennisP
That's true. There are several specific slashing conditions, and I forget the
exact details, but they're all similarly well-defined and limited. There are
proofs that the network converges properly as long as most stake obeys those
conditions, and that's why only violations of those conditions are penalized.

~~~
keymone
> There are proofs that the network converges properly as long as people don't
> violate those conditions

do you have a link to those proofs? i've seen proofs already where underlying
assumptions were something like "majority of nodes are honest" or "network is
reliable", etc.

~~~
DennisP
I'm not up to date but here's the Casper FFG paper, which says:

> Accountable safety means that two conflicting checkpoints cannot both be
> finalized unless ≥1/3 of validators violate a slashing condition (meaning at
> least one third of the total deposit is lost). Plausible liveness means
> that, regardless of any previous events (e.g., slashing events, delayed
> blocks, censorship attacks, etc.), if ≥2/3 of validators follow the
> protocol, then it’s always possible to finalize a new checkpoint without any
> validator violating a slashing condition.

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09437](https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09437)

So if more than a third of the stake violates a slashing condition, that does
cause a problem, but only a temporary one since that stake is immediately
destroyed. (An important improvement over just assuming majority honest nodes
is that you can prove who violated any of the slashing conditions.)

There's been a lot of work since that paper, much of it discussed at
ethresear.ch.

Casper FFG is the version currently heading for production; in the paper it's
described as a finality layer adding security to proof of work. The original
plan was to reduce PoW rewards by 80% once the FFG layer was added. The new
design is a bit different and I think it relies less on the PoW layer, but I'm
not sure how it all fits together.

There's also Casper CBC, which is a more purist form of PoS they hope to
implement later. That seems to be making good progress but it's still in the
research phase.

------
fiatjaf
If Ethereum produces no good whatsoever, using less energy is still too
expensive.

------
onlyrealcuzzo
Serious question: why was the reward for mining ever so high? Wouldn't most of
the energy consumption problems not be a thing if the reward for mining was
drastically lower?

~~~
WatchDog
Lower relative to what? If a mining reward was 1 eth instead of say 10 eth,
then 1 eth would likely just be worth 10 times more.

~~~
AgentME
If mining had always been 1/10 of what it is now, then that would probably be
true since everyone would have 1/10 of what they would have had otherwise, but
if the mining reward was suddenly axed now, then there's no reason for that to
be true.

------
jpadkins
How different is PoS and PoW in practice (for ASIC eligible blockchains)?

I need to devote X units of currency to get Y hashrate to gain 51%. This is a
stake, needed to achieve a certain level of PoW.

One difference is PoS requires stake only from internal currency (you must
buy/mine a stake in that currency), vs ASIC PoW you can use a foreign currency
to buy your 'stake'. This might mean PoS is less volatile, or resistant to
external attacks.

~~~
tdmat
i can run POS node on a medium instance from AWS.

------
ramoz
Is there a public blockchain that can be used solely as a ledger, vs having to
integrate with the currency model?

~~~
jzymbaluk
Hyperledger is a series of projects sponsored by the Linux foundation,
Hyperledger Fabric [1] is an example of a blockchain project that is solely a
ledger and smart contract platform, that isn't focused on the currency use
case.

AFAIK there isn't a canonical public Fabric blockchain, it's mostly focused on
companies that want to roll their own private/permissioned blockchain, but I'm
sure there are projects that are what you're looking for.

[1][https://www.hyperledger.org/projects/fabric](https://www.hyperledger.org/projects/fabric)

~~~
ramoz
Thanks, yea we've considered implementing our blockchain requirements in
Fabric and making it readable through a public api. But this is really then a
"centralized" implementation.

The currency models of public blockchains are a distractor from the products
(would-be DAPPs) that we want to deliver, where an immutable ledger is still a
selling point.

Is it even worth it to do blockchain at this point? Maybe if we make the nodes
completely public? idk.

------
miguelrochefort
I wonder how it compares to Cardano's Ouroboros proof-of-stake system.

~~~
jacoblambda
Compared to PoW almost every PoS protocol is only going to marginally differ
wrt power usage. As for other metrics my bet's on Cardano but right now it's
anyone's game.

------
koliber
Coin miners use lots of electricity and release a lot of heat.

Electrical heaters use lots of electricity and release a lot of heat.

Would it be viable to start a company that sends attractive-looking coin
miners to people who heat with electricity? Have the coin miner subsidize 25%
of the electricity consumption as the icing on the cake.

Would the numbers work on that? Heating is mostly used in the winter. However,
some people also heat water year-round with electric heaters. Miners get
significantly cheaper energy and free co-location, at the expense of lower
amount of total mining per year (as the miner would not be mining when no
heating is needed) and increased logistic costs. An added bonus is that it
completely nullifies the "wasted energy" argument.

~~~
einr
Would it be possible to efficiently transfer the heat into the air without
using fans? Because having a bunch of GPU fans on full blast in your living
room is not an option. Electrical heaters are silent and need to be.

~~~
eeZah7Ux
You can heat up water in a boiler in a basement in a traditional heating
system.

------
zorpner
Why was the title changed from the accurate actual title of the article? It is
neither misleading nor linkbait.

~~~
floatingatoll
Note that only the word “absurd” was removed.

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anticensor
As long as Ethereum sync bandwith problem is not solved, it will not become
commonplace.

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Temasik
Tezos baking already live

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safgasCVS
This was going to happen anyways as crypto is dead

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_robbywashere
The origin of money itself is deeply rooted in proof-of-work.

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chris123
This will be interesting, especially when they start nuking miners they don't
like.

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rhlala
Make pos the validator of the pow. I find it really well designed in Decred
crypto currencie.

The hard thing is setting the rules to make everyone (users, miners and
developers) have power, can change things. That governance.

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gcmartinelli
Criticizing cryptocurrency for it's energy consumption is absolutely
ridiculous. Every step in technology requires ever increasing energy
consumption... hell... the universe expects us to keep increasing complexity
and energy consumption! Increasing entropy is basically our purpose...

And trying to decide what is - or isn't - a valid use of energy is pure
arrogance. If anything, we should be arguing about energy sources...

