Comment on Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power — government now requiring commercial miners to report energy consumption

• parpol@programming.dev ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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  • FaceDeer@kbin.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It's actually more true for proof-of-work mining than it is for proof-of-stake. PoW mining has strong economies of scale, a professional miner with a warehouse full of mining rigs and a special deal with an industrial electricity supplier can churn out hashes more cheaply than a home miner can. Whereas the hardware needed for PoS is negligible so there's nowhere near that disparity between small and large miners.

    Also, under Ethereum at least (the largest proof-of-stake chain and the one I'm most familiar with the workings of), stakers don't "dominate" the network. They have no decision-making power over what the consensus rules are. If the users decide to upgrade to a new version and the stakers refuse to go along with that or try to push an upgrade that the users don't want then those stakers lose their stake after the resulting fork.

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    • an0nym0us@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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      • FaceDeer@kbin.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        I went Googling for sources, and what I found says the opposite. Ethereum was becoming increasingly centralized under PoW but after the switch to PoS it became significantly more decentralized.

        in order to stake to a pool, you need to lock your tokens away, making them impossible to spend for a specified time period.

        This is exactly the point of proof-of-stake. You can't prove you've staked some coins if you don't actually stake them. If you've retained control over your tokens then they're not staked. I'm not sure how you think it could work otherwise.

        most of the criticisms I have of ETH are more damming of the way they went about the transition between two radically different consensus algorithms than about Proof of Stake itself.

        The transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake has been on Ethereum's roadmap since the beginning. It was rolled out in stages over the course of years. What was "damning" about the transition?

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• an0nym0us@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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  • Halcyon@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I don’t defend anything - I simply do not consider the existing crypto assets as an alternative to currencies at all. They are still so far from being reliable or stable to be a good means of general exchange. They have their place in the area of investment and speculation and that works fine for me.

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    • FaceDeer@kbin.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      How about stabletokens, many of which are pegged directly to the value of the USD?

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