Ethereum has been moving to proof-of-stake this year for 5 years now. Will it happen some day? Probably. But we don't know how PoS will go for ETH once it has moved. Besides, there are many other negative exernalities that the move to PoS won't get rid of.
This video[1] covers a bunch and doesn't even mention energy usage much. Off the top of my head: rampant fraud[2] (e.g. so-called rugs in the NFT space and stolen artwork being minted as NFTs), financialization of everything, strong incentives to build intrusive DRM to enable "true" NFT ownership, creating incentives to hoard vs. invest thanks to deflationary currency, and loss of privacy (everything on a public blockchain).
Enabling fraud, enabling ransomware, enabling authoritarian dictators to enrich themselves. Furthermore there's still Bitcoin that will never move to PoS, and the popularity of ETH also swaps over to Bitcoin and other cryptos.
Yes, yes, there are also scams in fiat money blabla. The problem here is, that cryptos are a strictly zero-sum game and don't add any value to anybody except people who are able to dump their coins to the next greater fool. So why should we accept all these disproportionate externalities?
Stolen credit cards and chargebacks are a big problem. Fiat currency has a whole slew of problems. Mastercard, Visa, Stripe and PayPal don't allow at risk products like in-game currencies, porn, etc. They frequently use their powers to cut off funding for certain political targets.
I don't think simply yelling "fraud" and "scams" is enough to dissuade people anymore. New talking point please.
Honestly the anti-crypto sentiment here is ridiculous. I hope people know that the same people preaching against it here are gobbling up crypto as fast as they can while trying to dissuade others.
> I hope people know that the same people preaching against it here are gobbling up crypto as fast as they can while trying to dissuade others.
Only a person who extends their crypto-scam thinking to others would think this way. I can assure you that I don't hold any crypto, and that I'm pretty certain that the majority of outspoken crypto sceptics don't hold any crypto.
I don't know a ton about the subject, but I remember someone mentioning that existing Ethereum miners don't want to move to PoS[1] as it's a loss of income for them. Can anyone confirm/deny?
Incidentally, while searching for the topic I also found an article[2] from August 2021 with this quote:
> Meanwhile, crypto mining manufacturers like Bitmain and Innosilicon are on track to release new Ethereum mining machines this year, all while knowing that Ethereum’s transition to a PoS network is just five months away, effectively making those machines redundant.
Confirmed. Miners are angry about EIP-1559 that burned gas fees instead of paying them to miners and are even more angry about the transition to PoS where they will lose their income stream completely.
The computer I'm typing this on is using gminer to mine on the flexpool.io mining pool. But it's just using a computer I would've purchased anyway. Some miners have tens of thousands of dollars invested in mining equipment or more.
Took me a minute to understand what you were talking about. The context of my claim was, "Since transitioning to PoS, hash rate has only gone up". You seem to think it's disproved by the fact that hashrate has gone slightly down for brief periods in the past even before the transition to PoS.
Hashrate has increased from 14.86 to 1001 Th/s in the past 5 years and is at an all-time high. Since "transitioning" to PoS, it has not gone down.
So saying that "the hashrate has only gone up" implies the hashrate never goes down [between any comparison point], but you agree that over some comparison points as displayed by the five year graph the hashrate has gone down correct?
Yes, the hashrate graph has a positive slope over large time series, but it does go down at various points along the time series so therefore saying "the hashrate has only gone up" is a false statement.
Respectfully, you are reading English words like a robot and completely ignoring the context of the conversation. Similarly, if I were to say, "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse" it would not be helpful for you to whip up calculations thereby proving my stomach is not large enough to accommodate the volume of horse meat necessary to make this true.
I have run into this in about 1 out of 50 interactions on HN over the years and I find it most helpful to point this out and mean no disrespect by it.
