This comes up everytime someone mentions the energy waste, so please answer one simple question: Which web3 services that are CURRENTLY online are not based on proof of work?
Any Ethereum L2 that commits transaction bundles to the mainnet, plus anything on Binance's EVM chain, Cardano, Solana, Polkadot, Avalanche... They're all proof-of-stake or not based on PoW.
And, Ethereum will transition to PoS by this year, ideally in August. All of the popular nine Ethereum execution/consensus clients should be ready for the merge, and mainnet has already been test-merged five times successfully.
The first existing PoW testnet will be merged on the first week of June. After that, there's two testnets remaining that will be upgraded (Ropsten -> Goerli -> Sepolia), and then it's time for mainnet.
Name another year that has had feature-ready clients across the board, with a working merge transition mechanism implemented across all of them. The proof-of-stake chain we're merging to was launched in December of 2020, and has been running since, with almost 400'000 validators currently.
The difference is that this time we actually have testnets already running the full Proof-of-Stake code, most recent news on this front is that the Ropsten testnet will merge on June 8th, that's a huge milestone considering Ropsten is like _the_ testnet if you're developing for the EVM, and is only slightly younger than the ETH mainnet itself.
I've seen stories detailing how they were ready to switch to PoS by "the end of the year" as far back as 2017. Ethereum has been PoW for it's entire existence, and has also been promising PoS for almost 3/4 of that time. It's not impossible that this time it's really true, but I'll believe it when it happens.
Cardano, Solana, Polkadot, Avalanche, Ropsten, Goerli, Sepolia, Iota, Algorand, Iota...? You're all making fun of me by making up funny words now, don't you?
No, just kidding. To be fair, I wasn't aware that there is SO MUCH going on in the crypto space that I have never heard of. But these (as far as I can see) are different blockchains, not actual sites that a user can use do do useful stuff or access useful information.
That's why I was asking for services - to my understanding, just creating a new coin does not make it "web3".
These are all chains that support smart-contracts, meaning that services can be built on top of them! I don't know much about the DeFi ecosystem on other chains, but all of them should have at least _something_ going on.
None of them have critical mass because none of them are scalable.
So no, actually, they don't have very much going on at all.
It's trivial to solve one single aspect of the much larger problem by deciding to punt on solving other extremely crucial aspects, like scalability, or decentralization.
The biggest challenge in general is that the approach of storing every transaction forever leads to petabytes of storage. And you can't expect a decentralized system to require petabytes of storage.
I apologize if this a naive question but Proof of work is also decentralized no? Why does Proof of Stake incur these scaling limitations but Proof of work does not?
Can you elaborate? The person I was replying to indicated that the problem was one of storage however the only scalability problems I have seen written about have been around transaction processing.[1]
