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Comment by steelstraw | Hacker News Reader

He should be ashamed of displaying such a combination of ignorance and arrogance. Having alternative currencies is incredibly important for those living under corrupt regimes and/or hyperinflation and/or unbanked, and most cryptocurrencies don't use proof of work. They could just not accept Bitcoin and Eth1 then.

A single Google Search: 1,080 J

A single Solana transaction: 1,837 J

One eth2 transaction: 126,000 J

Watching an hour of television on a 40 inch+ LCD TV: 540,000 J

https://solana.com/news/solana-energy-usage-report-november-...

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I notice you are avoiding listing Bitcoin and PoW Eth here. If https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-co... is to be believed

1779.11 kWh per single Bitcoin transaction would be

One Bitcoin Edit: Block Mined: 6,404,796,000 J

One Bitcoin Transaction on a Block: 2,287,427 J

One Credit Card Transaction: 5,351 J

Edit: Since the source isn't exactly clear if one transaction is a reference to one block mined or one transaction on that block, I'm going to assume it is for one block mined. I'm going to estimate one block contains 2800 transactions.

Also citing Eth2, which is vaporware.

I mean the beacon chain is online, but the "merge" is always 6 months away. I think it's crazy to see so many billions locked up in a contract for software that hasn't been written yet, but hey, its all funny money anyway.

To that end, it's very humorous that ETH put in a doomsday mechanism to encourage the merge, but we just keep kicking the can down the road.

Kind of tells you a lot about humanity.

The first phase of the transition to ETH2 was implemented on December 1st, 2020, with the launch of the Proof of Stake Beacon Chain. The Beacon Chain has been running without problems for over a year now.

The testnet for the second phase of ETH2 - which is when the execution chain is merged into the Beacon Chain so that Ethereum can fully switch from PoW to PoS and reduce its energy consumption by 99.95% - was launched on December 20th, 2021:

https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/12/20/kintsugi-merge-testnet/

The second phase is expected to be completed before the end of 2022.

Yeah, a testnet launched in 2021 for a project that was supposed to be live in 2019, then 2020, then early 2021 feels a lot like vaporware.

I mean, how many times have we had to diffuse the difficulty bomb? How many more times will we?

The completion of the first and hardest phase, and a testnet for the second phase, is not remotely close to my definition of "vaporware". "Vaporware" doesn't mean "delayed", or "not complete". It means there is no concrete progress toward implementation, i.e. it's vapor.

Listen, I'm glad you're optimistic, but again, we've diffused the difficulty bomb what, 5 times? And each time, the merge is 6-12 months out? And Vitalik himself said that the delays are due to the team not agreeing on the specs of ETH2 (vs. technical constraints)?

I guess we at least agree that your definition of "vaporware" is a lot stricter than mine. Hell, even Duke Nukem Forever came out eventually, so I may very well be wrong.

ETH PoW is almost dead. We’re in the multi-client test net stage now. We’re rehearsing the switch multiple times on test nets to make sure it goes perfectly since there’s no takebacks on prod.

The bellow comment calling it “vapor ware” is ignorant.

> ETH PoW is almost dead.

I've been reading variations of the line "Ethereum is only weeks/months away from Proof of Stake" since probably early 2019.

Also doesn't Proof of Stake introduce another set of problems?

> Ethereum is only weeks/months away from Proof of Stake" since probably early 2019.

No, you haven’t. POS was, at best, a year plus away in 2019. No one credible was suggesting “weeks” back then… the beacon chain wasn’t even close to live yet.

ETH2’s beacon chain launched in Dec 2020 successfully, and has been running over a year in parallel with tens of billions in staked currency protecting it. This launched on time. The plan was originally:

1) beacon chain

2) sharding

3) the merge

The merge is when PoS takes over for PoW. The roadmap was changed in mid 2021 to push #3 before #2. That’s what’s about to happen, and I would even now put it in “months” . It won’t be “weeks” until a merge block # is announced, which will itself be weeks after the announcement of a successful testnet campaign (often multiple).

> No one credible

That's the main problem when it comes to this topic, isn't it?

I can’t help you if you ingest random internet comments in Bitcoin maximalist communities as gospel.

I wonder whether the credit card transaction energy includes the energy spent by thousands of bankers traveling to work each day in petrol powered cars to issue the fiat loans that fuel our modern currencies.

Oh there is plenty more in pure energy costs not represented here, but banks do more than just store and move money. Just like crypto currencies being powered by renewable energy, nothing preventing banker cars and data centers from being powered by renewable energy either.

I wonder if the Bitcoin energy includes all the countless people shilling online and traveling by plane to conventions to talk about it and otherwise wasting energy.

And what could be better for "those living under corrupt regimes" than a system widely used for money laundering?

That’s the point. Money laundering is the main feature. It is great for traditional criminals, but also helpful for folks for which money laundering is a weekly part of just surviving, because they don’t have a local reliable currency.

Do you think that ordinary people are more or less likely to take advantage of a system with such high transaction fees and personal risk exposure than the corrupt elites looting their countries?

I don't think it's unrealistic to think that at some point in the near future that ordinary people in the third-world will be using crypto for their every day transactions. Crypto is going through a massive maturity phase right now. I'm certainly not blind to the massive problems with crypto right now, but seeing chains such as Algo that are actively seeking to be both low cost and carbon neutral gives me great hope.

It's definitely possible but I'm not very optimistic because the entire space is so dominated by rich people: VCs are expecting returns on the scale of many billions of USD and that would require extremely high adoption to recover from a service which can be useful in poorer countries. We haven't even seen “better PayPal” in countries like the U.S. where the existing transaction fees go a lot further.

Illicit activities like cybercrime, money laundering and terrorist financing made up only 0.15% of all crypto transactions conducted in 2021

https://www.axios.com/cryptocurrency-scam-crime-popularity-r...

A blockchain company said that blockchains weren’t evil? You don’t say.

You know there is this company I heard of that has a long history saying some nice things about cigarettes. Maybe I should buy some.

The source for this article is a "study" from Chainanlysis which only tracks a handful of the possible illicit activities crypto can be used for. They are tracking scams and rugpulls, adding them together, and using that as the "illicit transactions" metric, then dividing that by a ballooned marked cap to get 0.15%.

Considering 40% of all of Bitpay's transactions are for "Gift Cards" [0] (a la money laundering), it seems to be that this blog is being as charitable as possible to CC to get their numbers.

[0]: https://bitpay.com/stats/

You can't assume gift cards are all money laundering. What an absurdly inflammatory and baseless allegation.

The fact is, there is no actual evidence of this extreme prevalence of crime within the crypto space that you allege.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence...

This provides examples of phenomena that are very similar to other phenomena known to possess particular properties, and argues you don't need new evidence to deduce that there is a significant chance that the example phenomena share the same properties as the similar phenomena.

This is not congruent with the gift card example. There is no comparable product that is known to be used in the majority of cases for money laundering.

I really do sympathize with people living under corrupt regimes. And I sympathize with them having to use a metal pipe to whack someone in the head to survive. Does that mean that non-profits should start embracing head-whacking?

I think the poster isn't actually living under a corrupt regime because (and I always come back to this), you can't really buy crypto with currencies outside of USD/EUR/JPY/KRW/sometimes RMB and if you have access to those, then you already have hyper-inflation protection taht has historically preformed much better than any crypto has.

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