How many pounds of coal did this game consume? I wonder if it's possible to compare the watt-hours of a typical game of snake as compared to this.
kgin pointed out that the gas fee was already about $150 USD, so I'm surprised that buying carbon offsets would be only another $112. That seems downright reasonable.
to answer the more facetious but concerned prior poster, blocks use energy no matter how many transactions are involved, so the existence of the transaction itself was not a meaningful contributor to the energy use. completely empty blocks use almost the same amount of energy, which inevitably solidifies the actual concern about Proof of Work energy use, but also highlights how its not a useful comment on any thread that coincidentally used a Proof of Work blockchain as a development platform.
Does that mean you already knew it was on mainnet when you replied before?
It's entirely true that a different article about a different topic could have used "on Ethereum" to mean something different. But if you already know this is on mainnet Ethereum, and someone asks about mainnet power usage, then talking about other ways to interpret "on Ethereum" is a total non-sequitur.
I think with broader education that “Ethereum” will mean Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) just like “Java” means Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and that it will have nothing to do with the reference implementation
No-coiners and non-Ether maximalists have never had nuanced enough arguments, mostly related to the amount of capital in the reference implementation, and fortunately they are getting diluted in favor of more nuanced education on the development environment side, but as always speculation drives innovation
That doesn't mean we shouldn't ever develop anything new. The clunky inefficient phase is a necessary step to figure out how to get to the sleek, efficient phase. It's a nonlinear process. The slope is pretty flat at the beginning of the exponential. Shortsighted people often mistake this for failure.
For PoW to work, they necessarily must be inefficient, there is no future possible where they become more efficient. Inefficiency is a necessity for them to exist.
> humans figuring out how to do something they want to do
Humans don't want tulips that much (or monkey GIFs, or Amway toothpaste, or whatever the scheme du jour is). They want to get rich quick, and to show off their status to their peer group.
If collecting tulips however is destroying the planet, you and I have a responsibility to make this scheme unfeasible.
[0] https://yanmaani.github.io/proof-of-stake-is-a-scam-and-the-...
I'm not going to pretend I'm expert enough to tell if that blog post is right or not. Vitalik Buterin and a lot of other very well informed people seem to disagree. I suppose we'll find out. As someone mentioned in the comments when that was posted, if you think you have a way to double-spend on a Proof-of-Stake system, then go onto one of the many existing PoS chains and prove it. Talk is cheap.
> Vitalik Buterin [...] seem to disagree
Vitalik is quoted twice in this blog post to drive the entire point home, you can quickly Ctrl+F for his name.
Like, I said, I'm not going to pretend I fully understand all the math and everything behind it because I don't. If it doesn't work, prove it. Otherwise you can look at the trillions of dollars worth of value being moved around the world right now on blockchain networks and you can surmise that the current approach is very much working.
I don't know, how many kids helped put your iPhone together? How many women did your tax dollars widow? How many "Made in China" widgets do you own? I am so sick of this holier-than-thou narrative on HN. I am 100% a crypto critic, but the idea that crypto is the primary existential threat we face today is not only absolutely absurd, it's also highly hypocritical, considering how routinely mega-corps eschew human rights reform and eco-responsibility.
The problem is the ratio of entertainment:cost is extremely bad for PoW blockchain art, and the cost is substantial and growing. It doesn't matter at all that it's not the "primary" threat, and you should realize that's a strawman.
Looking at that ratio also explains why it's not hypocritical, or at least it's only slightly hypocritical and still a valid and important criticism of a waste.
1) reach consensus on tx history (without being hampered by notions of weak subjectivity like PoS is)
2) provide a somewhat fair distribution mechanism for new coins (something PoS fails at completely)
The author paid Ethereum fees to run snake on the world's crappiest "global supercomputer" (as they like to call it). Those fees then support miners who consume energy and semiconductor resources that could have been spent on something more useful.
Arguably, a sell-transaction of ETH could be energy-positive in that it causes downward-pressure on the ETH price.
This also means that buying ETH on an exchange can be considered as contributing to the energy consumption of the network.
The fees the miners earn are currently a small part of their revenue:
https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereu...
Interesting thought, but mining profit margins are rather thick right now in most parts of the world (because the supply of miners is a little inelastic--mining equipment doesn't just poof into existence as the price rises). So I don't think anyone is turning miners on or off in response to small movements in the price right now.
Also, if you bought and then sold that would seem like a wash. Or worse, since you temporarily raised the price and therefor incentivized mining for that time.
I guess there's another causal chain, which is 'buying ETH to pay gas fees -> price of ETH goes up -> value of block reward to miners goes up -> more miners find it profitable to operate rigs'. I wonder how strong that effect is.