Ethereum finally goes POS, marking the end of gpu mining era

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

4 minutes ago, leadeater said:

No that's just your bias based on how it's done now. You could for example only allow it to be run on dedicated specific hardware and the purchase of said hardware is restricted to merchant banks, or literally whatever. PoW is not the issue, it's how it's been implemented right now.

 

You can do whatever you want, it's just software when it comes down to it.

I agree that if you put regulations in place to only allow authorized parties to have rigs, the structural incentive to build big rigs, disappear. It's moved to a political/economical negotiation to be accepted as authorized party.

But if you already compromise and have a central authority to appoint nodes/validators, why not just use a cheap and fast SQL database? I fail to see the value proposition a private blockchain adds if validators and nodes are private.

[CTR640]

5 minutes ago, tikker said:

Yep, same here. Winter and summer temperatures are like 1-3 degrees hotter than "normal" this year. Winters used to mean freezing weather, snow and ice skating 15-20 years ago. Now it's rare to get proper snow at all, let alone proper freezing weather for many days.

Did we even got snow last winter? I can't remember that. I do remember we had snow last year but only wet snow. Now all we got is rainy days.

A shame. 20 years ago was probably the best, so many cold freezing days, we used to have days free of school because of snow and ice, it was dangerous on the roads. Man, it sure has changed a lot.

 

We probably will never get back to that climate ever again. I'll never forget about that one day that was 39C degrees here, that WAS SERIOUS SEVERE! 39C in humidy Netherlands is a death sentence. (Unfortunately I'm not kidding...)

[leadeater]

9 minutes ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

But if you already compromise and have a central authority to appoint nodes/validators, why not just use a cheap and fast SQL database? I fail to see the value proposition a private blockchain adds if validators and nodes are private.

SQL database could never do this, fundamentally a different thing. It would also be less energy efficient trying to commit all the transactions globally and verify them. One of the biggest pain points about data driven websites deployed globally is databases, the amount of technologies and workarounds to address the problem is vast. Redis for example is used in that way, because if you didn't do memory caching and every query went back to a SQL database it would literally die regardless of the hardware.

 

What we're talking about is literally what banks do now on very large mainframes that consume lots of power and cooling, require huge amounts of administration and accompanying skills to do the job etc. And because these are all separate systems they utilize message passing systems between them across secure networks because none of them are actually in sync with each other. It's like mesh networks and ethernet, each node you add the number of cables per node gets WAY worse so the answer if do it a different way.

[leadeater]

Also authorized hardware is just one way, different way would be to have it inbuilt that the work that can be done is proportional to the actual network demand/need so adding hardware only lowers your power efficiency therefor profit. Adding more hardware and getting no extra work will prevent adding more hardware.

 

Yea that is similar to PoS, just without the stake requirement basically.

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

15 minutes ago, leadeater said:

SQL database could never do this, fundamentally a different thing. It would also be less energy efficient trying to commit all the transactions globally and verify them. One of the biggest pain points about data driven websites deployed globally is databases, the amount of technologies and workarounds to address the problem is vast. Redis for example is used in that way, because if you didn't do memory caching and every query went back to a SQL database it would literally die regardless of the hardware.

 

What we're talking about is literally what banks do now on very large mainframes that consume lots of power and cooling, require huge amounts of administration and accompanying skills to do the job etc. And because these are all separate systems they utilize message passing systems between them across secure networks because none of them are actually in sync with each other. It's like mesh networks and ethernet, each node you add the number of cables per node gets WAY worse so the answer if do it a different way.

I disagree. A Blockchain is an append only database. There is nothing you can do with a blockchain you can't do with SQL or other corporate database systems. Compared to the current implementation of BTC, SQL is about 100000X more efficient and 1000X faster.

You can have consensus mechanisms that are cheaper and faster than PoW. ETH PoS is six times faster, and right now probably 1000X more efficient, but the sheer fact your database is duplicated in multiple machines makes it so it will be slower and less efficient than a properly optimized SQL database.

[leadeater]

59 minutes ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

I disagree. A Blockchain is an append only database. There is nothing you can do with a blockchain you can't do with SQL or other corporate database systems.

Blockchain handles the verification of transactions and also the ownership of the currency. SQL databases are isolated islands, there is no connectivity between them so how are you going to do it and make it scale? You'll end up back at the very answer blockchain solves.

 

59 minutes ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

Compared to the current implementation of BTC, SQL is about 100000X more efficient and 1000X faster.

No because these are very different things, SQL is great at doing transactions which is fine if that is only what you need to do. Problem is a global currency requires more than that so then SQL because highly impractical tool to do it.

 

Banking systems are the way they are for exactly this reason.

[leadeater]

53 minutes ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

but the sheer fact your database is duplicated in multiple machines makes it so it will be slower and less efficient than a properly optimized SQL database.

You absolutely cannot under any circumstances have a single SQL database run a global currency. There is no situation in the world where this could work. So you will have multiple copies, hundreds in fact so the question I would ask you is how would you keep all these databases synchronized and verify data consistency?

 

Since banking systems are this already may I ask why there isn't just 1 database? Obviously this is a rhetorical question, but you need to think this through A LOT more.

 

None of this actually addresses how PoW is a fundamental issue that can only ever be bad. You can write it however you want, do it any way you want, run it on any hardware you design and allow it to. Neither does PoS have to be the way it is now either.

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

32 minutes ago, leadeater said:

You absolutely cannot under any circumstances have a single SQL database run a global currency. There is no situation in the world where this could work. So you will have multiple copies, hundreds in fact so the question I would ask you is how would you keep all these databases synchronized and verify data consistency?

 

Since banking systems are this already may I ask why there isn't just 1 database? Obviously this is a rhetorical question, but you need to think this through A LOT more.

 

None of this actually addresses how PoW is a fundamental issue that can only ever be bad. You can write it however you want, do it any way you want, run it on any hardware you design and allow it to. Neither does PoS have to be the way it is now either.

You could, you could have the Stupid Huge World Bank SQL Database (SHWB-SQLdb) and everyone query it when you make transactions. It's dangerous, stupid and impractical and not done this way. Having a single homongous centralized point of failure is asking for a disaster.

 

BTC aims to have one humongous distributed ledgers with all transaction seen by everyone. Which is a solution to the problem above. A very, very bad solution, you have a centralized point of failure for the global economy, because If you pool all data in one system, you have a centralized system, even if data is decentralized.

The financial system is made of lots (and i mean a lot) of different systems in a hierarchy that divide the problem. Of the system that I know (I'm not an expert, I'm missing lots of them likely), you have:

 

The central banks of countries that take care of creating currency out of thin air, and lend it. that's one database for each sovereign currency.

 

Then you have a system in which big banks ask the central banks for loans through a special circuit and in which banks exchange money with each others. I think the most popular by far is SWIFT.

 

Then big banks have individual smaller banks, each given an allowance, and a database insulated by internet and synced daily, it handles mostly wire transfers, which I believe are fancy e-mail when you boil down to how it works, because of all KYC and AML requirements.

 

You have trading circuits, like the high speed optic fiber cable between big stock exchanges and economic centers, which I know little about.

 

You have credit card circuits for fast transactions (VISA, MASTERCARD) that have totally indepent circuits, they handle transactions first come first served, and track use with centralized resources. I believe there are multiple servers serving regions, but I don't know its inner workings. Those circuits are the closest implementation to what blockchain does.

 

BTC is a very, very, very slow partial implementation of the VISA circuit.

 

Could you replace those systems with blockchain equivalents? Yup.

 

I honestly don't see the added value that would provide, but I would sorely miss the ability to undo a wire transfer with the wrong decimal point if the wire transfer system is transitioned to blockchain. An irreversible blockchain is a big no-no for me.

[tikker]

19 minutes ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

BTC is a very, very, very slow partial implementation of the VISA circuit.

Speed-wise people shouldn't get too hung up on BTC or ETH. They have become victims of their popularity and are slow. There are multiple coins out there that work faster and can do a couple to many transactions per second for a while already.

19 minutes ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

BTC aims to have one humongous distributed ledgers with all transaction seen by everyone. Which is a solution to the problem above. A very, very bad solution, you have a centralized point of failure for the global economy, because If you pool all data in one system, you have a centralized system, even if data is decentralized.

It makes sense that it is not a complete solution to that, because BTC was made for peer-to-peer transactions without a central trusted party, not to run a global economy.

19 minutes ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

I honestly don't see the added value that would provide, but I would sorely miss the ability to undo a wire transfer with the wrong decimal point if the wire transfer system is transitioned to blockchain. An irreversible blockchain is a big no-no for me.

I can't speak for foreign banks, but over here this already isn't possible anyway. Any transfer you make willingly, that is you enter an amount, account and press send, cannot be undone by yourself. You can only request the unintended recipient to wire it back or ask the bank to mediate if you have no contact information yourself (which they legally cannot provide).

[Kisai]

5 hours ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

 

The USA has been able to harness the Shale deposits only in recent history. Those deposits were inaccessible without the right technology, and didn't count toward the reserves back then. Production has increased, and can increase enormously with new technologies.

 

I'll share a chart that worries me: BTC Hashrate has been growing at about 50e18 hashes/s each year. If for some reasons, BTC wins and is used at scale like the USD, eventually most of the resources of our civilization will be spent churning PoW hashes for the BTC network... Those calculations are done under the assumption that all network operators are using the most efficient mining rig possible, about one and a half million of them drawing 3KW each. Under those assumptions, each BTC transactions yesterday used about 50 liters of gasoline worth of energy.

 

 

4 hours ago, Jito463 said:

Nope, can't say I have.

Are you sure about that?  I found these through just a simple search, imagine if I really went digging.  And all of this was just within the past 10 years.

 

October 2012: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/american-oil-find-holds-oil-opec/story?id=17536852

November 2016: https://www.ibtimes.com/nearly-1-trillion-worth-oil-found-texas-largest-deposit-ever-discovered-us-2448534

December 2017: https://www.rt.com/business/411524-china-trillion-oil-deposit-discovered/

Oil/Shale was never counted as a reserve because Oil has to be above $120 USD a barrel to make it worth extracting. This is why the back and forth on oil pipelines is such a disaster. These companies want to extract the oil, but don't want to pay to transport it by truck, can't get any oil pipeline capacity, and rail capacity is already full. They want to send the oil to Texas to do the actual refining because they can't do the refining where it's pumped, because you can't store refined petroleum products very long.

 

A lot of "found supply" is actually supply that's been known for 50+ years, and was just too expensive to reach, let alone get pipelines to. The oil shale/tar sands stuff is some of the most nasty, environmentally destructive oil extraction in existence. The sooner we reverse course on oil demand the better.

 

Anyone who thinks oil-as-a-fuel will still be around by 2100, I've got news for you. The reason pacific coast states/provinces are pushing to zero-emission vehicles is entirely because they don't want oil to be shipped through their ports, everyone remembers the Exxon Valdez spill. We can see this problem on the East coast right now with Europe getting an energy crunch because there is very little export capacity from North America. It's just not economical to ship expensive-to-reach/process oil to Europe from North America, just like it's never been economical to ship oil from the Saudi Arabia. It's only done because the oil is super-cheap to extract there.

 

Anyways, I've said my peace on the matter. We should not be trying to burn all the oil we know we have because of the potential for the bottom to fall out of the market in 80 years. By then it will be too late. The Oil barons will have their money, and everyone will be suffering from it.

 

If crypto coins cost very little energy to mine, let alone process, we would be having an entirely different discussion, but as per usual , people who are neck deep in crypto-as-an-investment don't want to admit they did something foolish, and are trying to justify having wasted resources (money, hardware, time, etc) having engaged in it. It happens to all of at some point. You see something really cool, but you can't convince anyone that it's good.

 

We are presently seeing that problem in the "AI Art generation", where unlike NFT's, The AI itself is able to churn out "art" , and the same fools are trying to pull the monkey scam, again. Like it has to be said, the tools are never the problem. The problem is people seeing a way to monetize other people's energy, time, using the tools without paying them for it. If an artist wanted to train the AI tools using only their own art, the AI could very well save them great amounts of time when working with clients who literately do not know what they want, and can thus throw hundreds of "drafts" at the wall to find something the client actually likes, and work from there. 

 

Presently, It a RTX 3090:

takes two minutes to generate a 512x512 image from stable diffusion

a 20 frame-per-second deepfake at 512x512

100 steps per minute on NN training for TTS

 

We are, in effect, pretty close to a point where a single top-of-the-line GPU can operate AI tools, but if the GPU alone is burning 500w to do that, then well, it better be worth the time and energy spent. Just letting the GPU burn energy to over-train a model isn't helpful, and neither is generating unconvincing and/or incoherant low-quality images.

 

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

You could, you could have the Stupid Huge World Bank SQL Database (SHWB-SQLdb) and everyone query it when you make transactions. It's dangerous, stupid and impractical and not done this way. Having a single homongous centralized point of failure is asking for a disaster.

But it wouldn't actually work though, it would just be a mass of deadlocks, giant query latencies due to distance so nothing would actually work at all. You'd be able to do the required transactions per second in a benchmark, well you can very easily it's actually not that high, however that's just not going to translate over to real world serving an actual application/platform.

 

It's a lot more complicated than just getting a giant powerful server with a good database engine and firing database queries at it globally. It's not even about failure risk, it just wouldn't actually work.

 

2 hours ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

I honestly don't see the added value that would provide

It's supposed to be a currency that can be used world wide that requires no conversions or any extra/additional processing to send that currency to anyone anywhere at any time without a central authority controlling it all, imposing their rules and policies.

 

If I wanted to send you some money now how easy would it be for me to do? If it were bank to bank then it would take a really long time, couple of forms to complete, verification of who I am, who you are, what the purpose of the money is being used for being queried (at least here if I send to you). Also don't forget the fees.

 

The problem is there are solutions to this already, like PayPal  But like that is centrally controlled and has rules and policies so therefore evil heh.

 

Comes back to my edit a few posts up you probably didn't see, it's really just about control right now and nothing else. Power grabs wrapped up in fluffy hype to hide what it really is.

[ewitte]

I checked whattomine earlier today.  The best I saw was 41 cents a day on a 3080 and even at 10 cents per kw it used 81 cents of electricity.

[ewitte]

On 9/15/2022 at 6:49 AM, Avocado Diaboli said:

Bottom line is, crypto is a cancer that needs to be eradicated at the root.

What IS cancer is anything government controlled.  Crypto was designed to fix that and give the power back to the people.  Unfortunately so much control has been given back...

[Avocado Diaboli]

3 minutes ago, ewitte said:

What IS cancer is anything government controlled.  Crypto was designed to fix that and give the power back to the people.  Unfortunately so much control has been given back...

Ah yes, I absolutely hate all the public infrastructure paid for with my taxes. I totally agree with you, we should abolish taxes and instead instate an objectivist utopia where every square centimeter of land is privately owned and if you want to pass over it, you'll have to pay a fee to the owner.

 

Listen, once you arrive in the real world, you might notice that "government" and "the people" are literally the same thing. I have no idea where this notion comes from that many delude themselves into believing that "government" is something wholly separate from "the people" and some kind of force outside of your reach. Crypto gave you what you currently have in more concentrated form. If you're unhappy with the status quo, you don't hate the government, you hate free market capitalism. And the only reason you're not blaming capitalism as a concept is because crypto promised you you'll be the one ripping others off.

[Brooksie359]

6 hours ago, leadeater said:

No that's just your bias based on how it's done now. You could for example only allow it to be run on dedicated specific hardware and the purchase of said hardware is restricted to merchant banks, or literally whatever. PoW is not the issue, it's how it's been implemented right now.

 

You can do whatever you want, it's just software when it comes down to it.

 

Edit:

Just to generalize on the core of the issue then that would be the desire to power grab. Those that are at the heart of cryptocurrencies really just want to move the power away from banks, because evil, yet they want to have the power the of banks so just want to be "the evil guys".

 

Really has nothing to do with the utility of the technology, want to provide a "decentralized currency", a means for the masses to trade globally with ease. Yea none of that, if those really were the objective and goals being worked towards it would have already been achieved. 

While I agree that sure pow could be possible if you had a ton of restrictions but fundamentally without those restrictions the profit incentives make basically any pow cryptocurrency super power hungry so long as it's still profitable. Ethereum switch away from pow is honestly a great thing and with crypto crashing we will likely see less shortages with the new gpus coming vs when the 3000 series came out. 

[leadeater]

2 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

While I agree that sure pow could be possible if you had a ton of restrictions but fundamentally without those restrictions the profit incentives make basically any pow cryptocurrency super power hungry so long as it's still profitable.

You could just not pay out on new blocks and just pay out on processed transactions, that would entirely ruin the desire to mine to the moon, or mine at all lol. Or maybe the fees would be insanely high. Anyway, I can think of many dumb solutions, not so many good ones.

[Jito463]

19 hours ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

Listen, once you arrive in the real world, you might notice that "government" and "the people" are literally the same thing.

Not always.  Even in the US, where this was literally the driving force behind the Constitution and our founding documents, it doesn't always work out exactly like that.  It should, but not necessarily.

19 hours ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

I have no idea where this notion comes from that many delude themselves into believing that "government" is something wholly separate from "the people" and some kind of force outside of your reach.

You don't think there are countries in the world, where the government acts in direct opposition to the best interests of the people?  I mean, just look at what happened the past two years alone.

19 hours ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

If you're unhappy with the status quo, you don't hate the government, you hate free market capitalism. And the only reason you're not blaming capitalism as a concept is because crypto promised you you'll be the one ripping others off.

I don't think you truly understand what free market capitalism is.  Ripping people off is not a hallmark of the free market.  It certainly can happen in a free market, but it's not the basis of it.

[Avocado Diaboli]

16 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

You don't think there are countries in the world, where the government acts in direct opposition to the best interests of the people?  I mean, just look at what happened the past two years alone.

 

I don't think you truly understand what free market capitalism is.  Ripping people off is not a hallmark of the free market.  It certainly can happen in a free market, but it's not the basis of it.

I'm not going to talk about the merits of public policy during COVID since this isn't the place for politics. But suffice to say: The government is staffed with people. It's not some nebulous force that tries to ruin your life. It's a collection of representatives given power in order to work as the binding agent of society to ensure that things ideally run as smoothly in the background as possible. People who use "the government" as some sort of tyrannical monster are really afraid of basic human nature because, as the adage goes, power corrupts. Even I as a very low-level government employee am faced with instances where I could let pettiness take a hold. Again, that's why I'm comparing it to capitalism, because it's the most direct form of applying egoism to finance. And sorry, you can't look back at the previous 100 years of snake oil sales men and conclude that capitalism is some kind of self-regulating process where only the best and honest thrive. That's some prime cut Ayn Rand bullshit that has never been true.

[Dracarris]

47 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

Not always.  Even in the US, where this was literally the driving force behind the Constitution and our founding documents, it doesn't always work out exactly like that.  It should, but not necessarily.

Then get your bloody gov apparatus fixed and don't hate on all governments as this evil thing that works against "the people".

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

1 hour ago, Jito463 said:

Not always.  Even in the US, where this was literally the driving force behind the Constitution and our founding documents, it doesn't always work out exactly like that.  It should, but not necessarily.

You don't think there are countries in the world, where the government acts in direct opposition to the best interests of the people?  I mean, just look at what happened the past two years alone.

I don't think you truly understand what free market capitalism is.  Ripping people off is not a hallmark of the free market.  It certainly can happen in a free market, but it's not the basis of it.

I don't think the point is that Government are always good. Ideally (and often in the west) governments rein in the excesses of capitalism by providing social policies to give a bottom for everyone, partially redistributing the fruit of the winners (taxes) to the losers as well, so that everyone benefits. Things like free healthcare, education, roads, public police, running water. System that don't work when run privately for profit. 

 

Blockchain, as desired by Satoshi, is an expression of an ideology called "Anarcho Capitalism", where regulations do not exist, and everything has a price. In this ideology, there is no penality for dumping nuclear waste in rivers, because "the market will regulate itself". Child labour, selling of organs, etc.. are all game in this ideology. If crime is a problem, you hire private police to protect you. If fire is a problem, you hire private fire fighters. if there are no roads, you build your private road and have others pay a toll, and hire security to enforce the toll.

 

Blockchain was meant by Satoshi to take all safeties off from the economic system. Blockchain itself doesn't even have concept of frauds. if a thief manages to steal an Ethereum NFT or a BTC, the thief is the owner, and ransom is the only way to get the asset back. That's by design. The consensus mechanism, be it PoW or PoS doesn't matter, Anarcho Capitalism is the aim the Blockchain technology fundamentally has.

[tikker]

51 minutes ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

Blockchain, as desired by Satoshi, is an expression of an ideology called "Anarcho Capitalism", where regulations do not exist, and everything has a price. In this ideology, there is no penality for dumping nuclear waste in rivers, because "the market will regulate itself". Child labour, selling of organs, etc.. are all game in this ideology. If crime is a problem, you hire private police to protect you. If fire is a problem, you hire private fire fighters. if there are no roads, you build your private road and have others pay a toll, and hire security to enforce the toll.

 

Blockchain was meant by Satoshi to take all safeties off from the economic system. Blockchain itself doesn't even have concept of frauds. if a thief manages to steal an Ethereum NFT or a BTC, the thief is the owner, and ransom is the only way to get the asset back. That's by design. The consensus mechanism, be it PoW or PoS doesn't matter, Anarcho Capitalism is the aim the Blockchain technology fundamentally has.

Blockchains, or more the consensus protocols behind the various blockchains around, do have the concept of fraud. The entire concept of those protocols is centred around solving the problem of how to arrive at honest/fair concensus in the precense of malicious actors trying to fraud the system when there is no central authority that decides right from wrong.

[Avocado Diaboli]

10 minutes ago, tikker said:

Blockchains, or more the consensus protocols behind the various blockchains around, do have the concept of fraud. The entire concept of those protocols is centred around solving the problem of how to arrive at honest/fair concensus in the precense of malicious actors trying to fraud the system when there is no central authority that decides right from wrong.

That's only "fraud" in terms of breaking the rules of the system. Problem is that those rules imposed by the system aren't the only ones in effect. It totally ignores laws, for example, and it has no means to adapt to laws changing, which right out of the gate makes it unfit for purpose.

[BabaGanuche]

7 minutes ago, tikker said:

Blockchains, or more the consensus protocols behind the various blockchains around, do have the concept of fraud

Please explain how to mark a transaction as a fraudulent one that needs to be reversed or how to unwind a fraudulent transaction for when the fraud happened off chain. That is what is meant by have a concept of fraud.

[tikker]

37 minutes ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

That's only "fraud" in terms of breaking the rules of the system. Problem is that those rules imposed by the system aren't the only ones in effect. It totally ignores laws, for example, and it has no means to adapt to laws changing, which right out of the gate makes it unfit for purpose.

  Could you provide some examples of what laws it can't adapt to?

30 minutes ago, BabaGanuche said:

Please explain how to mark a transaction as a fraudulent one that needs to be reversed or how to unwind a fraudulent transaction for when the fraud happened off chain. That is what is meant by have a concept of fraud.

Double spending and the likes are also fraud, so it is not correct to say the concept of fraud does not exist. Off-chain fraud I'd say is like cash fraud in the current system and thus similarly difficult. Fradulent transactions would be a harder to undo due to the system's nature, but as I mentioned in a reply above it's not very different the current banking system in my country. A transaction that was not an automatic charge is hard to get undone. You cannot undo it yourself and the bank will not reverse it without good reason, which in most cases will come down to authorisation from either the receiving account owner or legal order (wrong number is not a good reason and will require these hoops).

[BabaGanuche]

1 minute ago, tikker said:

A transaction that was not an automatic charge is hard to get undone

No, it is not hard. I have had fraudulent charges on my credit card and all I had to do contact the company and the reversed the charge and issued me a new card the same day no other questions asked. I don't think I could be easier.