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Comment by serverholic | Hacker News Reader

This is why I support crypto. I view it as a laboratory where we can experiment with ideas around finance and governance.

Many of the currently accepted ideas around these topics came from a pre-internet world. However, myself and others think that certain technologies have changed the game.

Maybe we need government or maybe we don't. Maybe we need a centralized currency, maybe we don't. The thing is we won't really know what we need until we run the experiments.

Personally I think these experiments are too important to silence them.

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Your laboratory has run for 12 years and is currently consuming 0.5% of the world energy output and 20% of new GPUs.

All of that without a popular usecase yet. Except for financial speculation, finance-of-last-resort, and crime.

I would say that laboratory is not using the research grants well.

You could say "finance of last resort" or you could call it a new paradigm of finance. You are simply dismissing something that you have no personal connection to.

When you can't open a bank account, are discriminated against by institutions, live in highly authoritarian environments etc. This type of finance is not a "last resort" it's your first resort.

The reason it's not "popular" however you want to define it is simply a matter of time and not function.

Ethereum is moving to a new algorithm that will reduce energy consumption by 99.95%. This is happening in a matter of months.

Asking about use-cases for crypto is like asking for use-cases for the internet in the 90s. It's so general purpose that there isn't a specific use-case to sell you on but instead a set of smaller use-cases that add up to a large use-case.

For example, I would love for charities to be built on crypto. Many of the larger charities only use a small percentage of their funds on the problem they're trying to solve. I'd love to see exactly what my charitable donation is being used for. Luckily crypto is public and therefore publicly auditable.

I could list off similar use-cases and each one doesn't seem to be a big deal. But put together it's a huge change in how we view the world.

And as for your other arguments like crime, these don't match up with actual data. Crypto being public is a large turn-off for criminals so they tend to prefer cash instead.

Ethereum has been moving to proof of stake for the past 4 years. Everytime these threads come up people bring up that ETH is *just about* to move to PoS, but it never happens.

You're presumably in software, you should know major software upgrades take years and always longer than expected. Doubly so when it's already being used for millions of transactions daily. Triply so when you're altering the fundamental nature of the underlying protocol.

They have already released the first of three phases. It's live now. I currently have some ETH on the new Proof of Stake chain. Second phase (where they merge it with the rest of the network) got pushed back a few months recently, but it's still expected Q1/Q2 2022[1].

I see and expect this argument from people who aren't in software, who expect everything to happen perfectly and instantly. But you should have been involved in enough projects to know you can't just Thanos snap a major software upgrade into existence.

https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/merge/

Game developers: "We need to push back the release date"

Gamers: "No problem. Take the time you need to make it good."

Crypto developers (who are responsible for billions of dollars): "We need to push back the release date"

Techies: "How dare you. I'm going to imply you're incompetent even though I don't follow the development process at all."

Algorand is carbon negative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NykZ-ZSKkxM

Yes, the laboratory would be fine if it weren't for BTC and ETH.

Experiment away! But not with mega-scale proof-of-work projects that consume ungodly resource as a byproduct of securing the network (which is a financial problem in any case)

> Experiment away! But not with mega-scale proof-of-work projects

Are you familiar with any methods to achieve the same characteristics of Bitcoin but without PoW? Perhaps the energy is not the issue, perhaps it's your view to the importance of it.

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