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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

> Ethereum's energy consumption will be reduced by ~99.95% following The Merge from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS). After The Merge, Ethereum will use dramatically less carbon to be more secure.

How many years has it been, at this point? I distinctly recall "imminent" plans to switch over to PoS as early as 2019.

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It’s very healthy to be skeptical. I’m no expert but the current status appears to be a successful test of the merge on a public testnet and an expectation that it will happen on mainnet in the next few months. More details here: https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/merge/ and a prediction market on the actual date it will happen here: https://polymarket.com/market-group/ethereum-merge-pos

Is a prediction market actually a useful predictor?

This is from a year ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27194586

They keep making the same announcement every few months.

They gotta keep that grift going to try and get out while they still can but not so fast that it collapses faster than it already is.

> The Merge, Ethereum will use dramatically less carbon to be more secure.

How is "[using] dramatically less carbon" more secure? What are the security implications?

> Since its inception, Ethereum has aimed to implement a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, but doing this without sacrificing security and decentralization has taken years of focused research and development.

A rather notable criticism of PoS, and its variations, is that it /does/ sacrifice decentralization to achieve its aims. I know that much smarter people than me have been working on this, and I don't follow research into consensus algos super closely, but I haven't heard or read anything validating PoS as the silver bullet it's made out to be.

I'm extremely skeptical that it's more secure.

PoW burns a lot of energy, but the algorithm has an elegant simplicity to it. Crucially, the _work_ is impossible to fake.

PoS (very roughly) means that the richest control the network... which seems reasonable. But suppose you decide to rewrite the blockchain to say you're the richest, do you then control the network? It's a circular loop, and defending against those kinds of attacks is dramatically more complex. I've been lightly following development and I get the sense they've been playing whack-a-mole with vulnerabilities and bugs since ~2016. It's hard to have confidence in the result.

Even if you controlled 51% or even 67% of the staking power, you would not be able to “rewrite” the blockchain to give yourself free money. A common misconception. All state transitions must follow the rules of the chain.

To be clear, I'm not claiming that any particular implementation of PoS is vulnerable to this exact attack. It's an illustrative example of one class of attack that is a danger on PoS chains but not PoW chains, and might help people intuit why PoS implementations are more complex.

Coming back down to earth, this is why ETH requires checkpoints[1], but PoW chains do not[2].

[1]: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms...

[2]: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/75733/why-does-b...

ethereum PoS finality is part of the mechanical consensus protocol and established every epoch or two automatically, vs Bitcoin “checkpoints” that were hardcoded into clients. not really comparable

Miners can not rewrite the blockchain. They only get to choose which transactions go in and which are rejected or delayed. Each transaction must be signed by the wallet owner so miners can not just assign money to themselves.

That's incorrect. There were plans to switch to hybrid PoS in 2018 which were (surprisingly even to Parity node devs) rapidly shelved. Since then a new design is being slowly worked upon. There were no plans to switch in 2019 that I recall.

The linked article does mention that work towards the transition has effectively been in progress since before Ethereum even launched.

If you're talking about when it started being claimed that it was happening soon, the beacon chain launched at the end of 2020, so probably 2019/2020 sometime.

Funny enough if you click through to find out what 'The Merge' is you get a 404.

At this point they should consider rebasing instead, clearly there's too many conflicts.

The last time I bought ethereum was around 2016/2017 when there were heavy talks of proof-of-stake coming soon.

That version of PoS would have required a minimum stake of 1500 ETH, because it couldn't handle many staking nodes. Then they figured out the beacon chain, which would support staking with only 32 ETH. They made a conscious decision to eat a couple years to go that way instead. The beacon chain launched as a parallel network in December 2020.

Yes, I do find it interesting that it's only finally happening now that the price of ETH is tanking. I wonder if the miners were paying bribes to keep their monopoly this long.

Those would have to be some amazing bribes. A full 10% of the ETH supply is locked up in the staking network, and neither the original capital nor earnings can be withdrawn until about six months after mining is eliminated. The dev teams themselves were granted significant amounts of staked ETH by the Ethereum Foundation.

The production staking network was launched in December 2020, was upgraded in mid-2021, and since then there's been extensive public testing of the merge with the rest of the network.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210806101020/https://spectrum....

According to this, the PoS schedule first slipped in 2017. (search for "snooze button")

Surely someone has made a graph analyzing the trend line of projected PoS switch date compared to the current date, à la https://xkcd.com/2014/... where might I find such a graph?

Why is this being downvoted?!

I'd also like to know. It's an honest question, and I don't see why we should evaluate Ethereum's power consumption based on an unrealized scheme that's been promised (and left undelivered) for years.

Because the final steps are finally being performed. Just because something has taken a long time, doesn't mean it will never be done. There is nothing more to be done now except the actual final step of the merge.

The latest test merges have gone very well, but when you're dealing with something this valuable, you do a lot of tests, just to be sure.

Okay. I can appreciate the need for caution and careful direction when making significant changes to a financial scheme.

What I recall is a number of public announcements over the years claiming that the PoS transition was imminent, only to have it delayed at the last moment. That kind of repeated whiplash is not confidence inspiring, either from a design or a community standpoint. Is there a reason to expect this time to be different?

I don't remember any announcement of the merge being imminent from the project itself. I remember lots of articles claiming that based on the project taking about the progress. There was some goal of ~2018 that was missed / didn't work out. But the "imminent" part became more of a meme people talk about than reality though.

>Is there a reason to expect this time to be different?

Well...

- five+ different consensus clients, all with a full PoS implementation and a working PoW -> PoS transition mechanism

- four different execution clients, all with a working PoW -> PoS transition mechanism

- Multiple (dozen+) of successful merges on testnets and shadow forks. Ropsten, an ancient test network, was successfully merged to PoS from PoW a couple weeks ago.

There's two more existing testnets that will be merged soon. Sepolia on the 5th of July, and Goerli on some date TBD. If those are successful and there are no major issues found, it's time for mainnet.

Because this comment is basically copy/pasted in every HN article about Ethereum[0]. It doesn't add anything to the conversation and is extremely repetitive. A bit like the "generics in Go" comments on every Go article until they were implemented.

[0] Not even 24 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31954276

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