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Comment by JohnJamesRambo | Hacker News Reader

ETH mining is going away forever with ETH 2.0’s The Merge that is set for June 2022.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/eth2-devs-put-out-call-to-com...

You mean the thing when the ETH people are going to hand the power over the people with the most money? I'm sure this idea is deeply chilling to... venture capitalists, they're probably shaking in their boots.

Whereas now power is with the people with the most... GPUs? Those don't grow on trees either.

Right. And both are bad.

How do you think proof of work operates now? Do you think big mining operations don’t take massive capital? They do, and also waste ungodly amounts of power at the same time.

The difference is PoW can still be distributed beyond what exists today if someone decides to get involved and take power away from the consensus.

With PoS the consensus chooses if they want to give up power and you can only gain decentralization if they choose to give it up.

POS only works with an active economy i.e. validation requires something to validate e.g. consumers using ETH to buy goods and services. This implies the general population has access to large amounts of liquidity of the currency.

A new institutional investor just needs to start hoarding that easily accessible liquidity and the biggest players in the space will need to give up their share or risk the price of the currency dropping to zero because it’s too hard to transact in it and therefore it’s no longer profitable to tie up 32 ETH and run validators.

You're conflating bitcoin mining with ethereum mining. Anyone with a GPU can mine eth and therefore the capital requirements are far lower. Now, of course if you want to make big money, then that requires big capital... but that could be said of nearly any business out there.

You gain more power by having more money in both PoW and PoS. In PoW it means you can buy more hashing power, in PoS it means you can buy more of the network's currency to stake. Even under PoS, the network's upgrades still rely on social consensus, as in node operators (!= validators) agreeing to forks, and the network's finality requires 2/3 of the network's almost 300'000 validators to come to consensus.

Yes.

"Actually both systems give power to those who are already wealthy" isn't the argument for democratization and decentralizations crypto believers apparently think it is.

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