Unlike meat consumption, mining doesn't map neatly onto the entire population. It's a rich few that can even buy this much compute power.
Bitcoin is 137 TW/h/yr
Etherium is 112 TW/h/yr
(thanks for pointing out me messing up units)
Those are both mid sized countries by now.
For reference, 120 TWh/yr is only twice the production of the Baihetan dam https://web.archive.org/web/20160302215312/http://english.cw...
Most people don't picture that an entire "mid sized" country could run off only 2 hydro dams.
Environmentally, Bitcoin and Ethereum's combined production of greenhouse gasses - ~50M tons CO2 - does not come anywhere close to the over 6 billion tons of CO2 of global greenhouse gas emissions caused by meat production.
Again, orders of magnitude more environmental damage, alongside the greatest cycle of sheer pain and suffering this planet has ever seen, and we don't even get something out of it. How can people point fingers at crypto miners while engaging in this far more harmful behavior?
Crypto contributes nothing but a speculative asset to society.
Meat production, while derailed into unsustainability, has a lot more utility and is also a lot harder to unwind from current culture. Try running a survey on which of the two people would rather forego, and your 100M to 6B ratio will look rather stupid.
One shitty behavior doesn't excuse another.
We will have to agree to disagree that stimulating the taste buds has more utility than providing a trustless financial system.
What's the point of a currency that doesn't scale and that everyone is too afraid to spend because of volatility.
Speculative asset, that's all you'll ever have there.
Didn't have that one on my bingo card...
But this is an even worse argument than usual - the people speculating with crypto constructs are very often also part of the groups who consume a whole lot of meat...
You are off by 3 orders of magnitude. Bitcoin alone validates 7 million transactions monthly. If there were only 50k users, an average user would be sending 140 transactions per month.
You are not making a great case here.
Patently false. For example an "average" processor like Western Union processes only 25 million transactions monthly.
"with the option of reversal"
Which is the whole problem. Bitcoin is irreversible, by design. That's crucial.
Modern agricultural harvesting and processing always has a bykill of small mammals and ground nesting birds.
Organic farming often uses companion planting to attract natural predators of insect pests, so that insecticides don't need to be used (as much anyway, there's plenty of rather toxic compounds that are perfectly natural and organic yet kill things well, like derris dust).
How, though, do you distinguish between the suffering of cows, and the suffering of a dormouse, or the suffering of caterpillars that are being eaten from inside by the larvae of a parasitic wasp?
Are you basing your morality on "there's an arbitrary level of suffering I'll accept" or "I'm only opposed to the suffering of life that has at least N neurons?"
Or are you sweeping the path as you walk lest an ant be harmed?
Once again, it's not just a simple case of "all animal husbandry is unsustainable", but we need to pick apart why the unsustainable practices have been developed into what they are now.
My gut feeling is that Government subsidies of corn in the US create an oversupply of it, so sure, why not feed it to cattle?
It's not like the American beef industry was predicated on grain feeding, it started with ranchers grazing them on prairies.
So what changed?
And I still wouldn't like it. Proof of Stake is even more directly aimed at making the rich richer, whereas Proof of Work only did it with a few extra steps. But at least they'd no longer be burning the planet.
None of this work has happened in the dark. The regular cross-team meetings, constant stream of commits on GitHub, etc. are in the open for all to see.
Next phase will be sharding and splitting out data availability from consensus strictly speaking, exciting times!
When they update they miners are simply cut off.
Furthermore, Ethereum contains a self destruct mechanism that requires a hard fork. Unless miners can coordinate a competing POW fork (and convince rich people that the bad PR and profits for them are worth it) they won't be able to do anything.
It obviously wouldn't be as large and probably suffer from everyone on real ETH selling off their duplicated assets, but it'll surely be a thing, a last ditch effort to keep mining rigs profitable before everyone moves on to the next best coin?
However unless it captures a siginficant fraction of ETH value it won't be worth much and in turn won't be attractive to miners.
Right now ETH makes up 95+ percent of all GPU miner revenue and there aren't a lot of (successful) new POW coins these days.
I think the (GPU mining) market simply collapsing has a high likelihood.
However this time around they have working implementations in all relevant clients which are being stress tested and debugged since a few months.
So far there have been quite a few bugs but nothing fundamental.
I'd say it's not unrealistic to expect the switch happening this summer according to the unofficial time line. There are a few billion dollars staked already and those funds as are locked until it happens.
I fully agree with your other point.
But I do hope that, somehow, all those miners will just... accept the move to PoS and turn off their mining farms. I just don't see it as extremely likely.
They can continue using POW (if they manage to coordinate an independent self-destruct mechanism override) however they cannot force the actual users (private individuals and infrastructure providers) to do so.
If miners don't manage to capture a significant fraction of ETH value in their hypothetical ETHPOW chain it won't be worth their effort. Buying a GPU for mining now caries a significant business risk and prices are already declining.
PS: There are billions of dollars already staked in the (currently empty) POS chain.
I do wonder what miners would do with all their hardware and infrastructure tho. Presumably they'll all just move to another cryptocurrency and nothing really changed, etherium got a little cleaner while bitcoin or whatever got a little dirtier.
Let's hope that POW turns out to be a very brief (in the great scheme of things) peak of human creativity / stupidity.