Comment by rauljordan2020 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rauljordan2020 | Hacker News Reader

I want to add more clarity on where Ethereum currently stands. I am one of the devs that worked on proof of stake and the future of the Ethereum protocol, bundled into an umbrella term called "Ethereum 2.0".

Eth2 is a monumental research effort to create a blockchain that makes no compromises on security, scalability, and decentralization. Given Ethereum is live today, secures a ton of value, and runs a lot of applications, it is almost impossible to upgrade to 2.0 via a simple network upgrade. As such, the project is split into phases. The first phase is a proof of stake chain that runs _in parallel_ to Ethereum today. People can join as validators via a "one-way burn" smart contract. The next phase is then "merging" the state of Ethereum today with this new chain using proof of stake via a docking process. That is, Ethereum will continue to function normally, but mining will be disabled and consensus will utilize proof of stake instead. My implementation of Eth2 is a client called Prysm written in Go here (https://github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm).

Previous attempts at proof of stake were either too expensive, too centralized, or hard to scale to a large enough number of validators. After many years of research and hard work, and leveraging really awesome cryptography for signature aggregation called BLS (Boneh–Lynn–Shacham), the first phase launched December 1st, 2020 and the current proof of stake chain is now securing over $10bn worth of value at the consensus layer.

A few important things to keep in mind:

- Ethereum development for its future is quite decentralized, with 4 different teams having implemented high-quality, production clients for proof of stake. These teams are independent of the Ethereum Foundation. Most other blockchains have only one, canonical client implementation that has very large majority share

- The "merge" is happening later this year or possibly very early 2022

- The technology used in Eth2 is quite a breakthrough in cryptography and I urge those curious to dig deeper. Using BLS signatures, the protocol can support millions of validators at the consensus layer

EDIT: readability

How energy efficient is this new proof of stake? And was energy usage part of the motivation?

Once proof of stake is fully implemented and everything is migrated over, there will be no more energy intensive mining. Mining on a proof of stake chain just involves putting your Ether as a deposit that gets slashed if you act maliciously, the energy cost of this is just to run the servers, essentially, its you putting your money where your mouth is. Potentially, by the time proof of stake is fully released, the cost to run your own node (32 ETH) could be between 100-500k depending on the market value of Ether.

The benefit of this with the mining algorithm that Ethereum uses is that you can mine with off the shelf consumer parts. When proof of stake is fully switched to, those parts will just be sold on the market.

With Bitcoin, switching over to something like proof of stake will be extremely political and will only work out if the market decides that the new proof of stake blockchain fork is the 'real' Bitcoin. It will be political because miner's mining hardware becomes e-waste so they have an incentive to continue mining regardless of the fork. The only way that miners stop mining Bitcoin is if the blockchain becomes worthless in the market so that the miners no longer can afford to pay their operating costs with the mining rewards.

You can run a validator on a Raspberry Pi, or as most people do, on an Intel NUC or an AMD-based equivalent micro-PC. A modest power consumption would be a continuous draw of 10 watts.

Now, assuming every single one of the 110,000+ validators runs on a dedicated machine (which is not the case) and consumes 10 W * 24 h = 0.24 kWh of energy daily, we get an annual energy consumption of roughly 87.6 kWh per validator.

Extending this assumption to the 110,000 validators currently validating on the mainnet, the annual energy consumption of the network would be 9,636 MWh, or roughly 10 GWh annually. In reality, this value is close to a worst-case scenario, as running multiple validators on one machine doesn't affect the load of the machine in any meaningful way. One could run 1000 validators on one Intel-based NUC.

For reference, the current PoW Eth chain consumes roughly 40 TWh of energy annually.[1] Assuming the annual energy consumption of 10 GWh for the PoS chain, the energy usage would drop by 99.975% (three orders of magnitude; E12 -> E9).

Assuming an error of an order of magnitude in the calculations for the PoS chain's energy usage (which would mean running every validator on a dedicated PC pulling a continuous 100 watts, or alternatively 1,100,000 validators), we'd still drop the energy usage by 99.75%.

[1] https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption

I wonder how the community really feel about this changes? Is mostly positive?

Definitely positive. The changes coming in Eth2 will both improve the security and the scalability of Ethereum. There isn't really any pushback towards this in the community aside from a select group of miners

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