The merge and with it the transition from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake will reduce Ethereum's energy consumption by a factor of ~2000 or 99.95%.
You can literally run an Ethereum PoS node in a Raspberry Pi.
You can literally run an Ethereum PoS node in a Raspberry Pi.
I know one of the stated goals is for people to be able to run validators on commodity hardware, and as you've pointed out, builds exist for ARM devices and have been shown to run on a Raspberry Pi, but it remains to be seen if you can "in practice" run a mainnet validator on a Raspberry Pi. That would be ideal, though!
It is somewhat risky in my opinion as you don't have the resources to track multiple chain heads in the event of a split, but it does work under nominal chain circumstances.
"Type 1 aims to replicate Ethereum exactly, and so it has no way of mitigating these inefficiencies. At present, proofs for Ethereum blocks take many hours to produce. This can be mitigated either by clever engineering to massively parallelize the prover or in the longer term by ZK-SNARK ASICs. ... Personally, my hope is that everything becomes Type 1 over time, through a combination of improvements in ZK-EVMs and improvements to Ethereum itself to make it more ZK-SNARK-friendly."
This isn’t the case with ZK provers. Each computation yields a solution, like regular fixed arithmetic math. Using more powerful FPGAs and adding more parallel provers, you can prove the same circuits in less time and less energy.
As hardware accelerated and parallel ZK proving technology increases, the amount of users and applications built on this technology can also increase. This is the opposite of Proof of Work, where more efficient mining rigs and higher hash rates will not lead to more network throughput or activity.
I'm saying that zk is being targeted for ASICs (Vitalik said it himself) and that zk will require some very specific compute needs that not everyone is going to be able to provide.
Every gamer (PC or console) that has used the "look at how much energy is being wasted" argument to be anti-crypto will have to eat their GPUs after the merge.
Bitcoin will be still wasting a crap load of energy, proportional to its value and has no plans to stop doing that.
You can be pro-crypto without being in favor of Bitcoin, you know? In fact, those who oppose crypto due to environmental concerns would help immensely if they stopped generalizing and became more specific about their arguments.
Bitcoin was a good first prototype, but it is clearly a failed experiment. It's not used as a currency, the "store of value" narrative is bogus. All it took was the first asset bubble to pop to demonstrate how BTC is only correlated with other stock prices.
It already loses to Ethereum in many metrics: transaction volume, number of wallets, decentralization (number of nodes participating in block validation) and so on. Layer-2 systems in Ethereum hold more Wrapped Bitcoin than lightning by orders of magnitude. Even if you really want to use BTC, the best way to transact bitcoin today is by wrapping it and using it on Ethereum.
IOW, stop criticizing "crypto" and start focusing on criticizing "Bitcoin". Be specific about your arguments, otherwise everyone will feel like they are on a Mexican standoff and you will never get the support to win the good fight.
The unethical thing is to keep BTC around just because there are so many sunk costs associated with it.
Look at Coingecko's list of ERC20 tokens, all of the top 60 tokens have a market cap above $1 billion. You can go ahead and remove Tether if you want, there is still another ~$100B there.
Bitcoin is not so dominant as the maxis would like to believe. It won't take much for Ethereum (as an ecosystem) to catch up, and when it does the flippening will come fast.