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Comment by latchkey | Hacker News Reader

GPU based mining of ETH will turn off, literally, in 15s (one block). But the thing is, it will just move to other coins, for now. Once those are not as profitable, things will rebalance as people shut off their GPUs.

Future, ETH will grow with power requirements too... just a lot more slowly... ASICs for zero knowledge are coming, which will create a bit of an energy race. Staking will always be increasing... which will require compute and power.

At the end of the day, overall, the existing power usage won't actually go away... it will just get moved to other things. Always remember that power companies are incentivized to sell their power to the highest bidder...

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Can you give more info about Zero Knowledge Proofs would require ASICS?

https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2022/08/04/zkevm.html

"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."

That doesn’t mean we need more power. It just means the requirements of ZK proofs may need specialized equipment to process them efficiently. Different problem.

It wasn't a comparison about the power requirements between PoW and zk proofs.

In other words:

Switching to PoS, removes power allocated to GPUs for ethash mining. Adding ASICs for zk creates a requirement that doesn't exist today, for using power.

I believe the zk provers will only be for L2s. The base layer will always be the way it is now. The base layer will be settlement for various shards, as it is now for Arbitrum and Optimism.

I don't understand how that comment applies to the discussion. Are you implying that L2s are somehow lower power requirements?

I’m saying there will be no requirement for ASICS in Ethereum. There may be L2s to scale Ethereum that require ASICS but that would be a voluntary decision by users who want to use said L2.

Again, that has nothing to do with the power requirements of ASICs.

I’m confused why we are arguing about. I thought you were claiming Ethereum needed ASICS to run and therefore would use more energy. Which is not the case.

It’s like saying the internet needs more energy to run when a new application is developed. No, the internet is the same, it’s the application that now needs energy. So while the total energy the internet uses has increased, it did not increase the total required for the internet to exist itself.

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