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Comment by noman-land | Hacker News Reader

The electricity argument has been made moot a while ago with the switch the proof of stake.

Not all NFTs need to be bought or sold. They can just as easily be used as membership tokens that are given away.

Also, according to the website, only some of the communities will be locked behind NFTs. Others appear to be free to join just with an Ethereum account used as auth.

I haven't used the service so I'm not going to defend it but it makes sense for web3 communities to base their auth around the tech they're already using, and that is crypto wallets. Everyone in the community already has crypto wallets so the friction to join is very low.

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The electricity argument might have been mitigated, but I don't believe it is moot. If it was moot then it would be entirely irrelevant. It is still relevant because the power requirements might have been reduced, but that means nothing for the total power consumption. Indeed, it is possible for power requirements to decrease while simultaneously not abating or even increasing power consumption!

Also, with the move to proof-of-stake, the winner-takes-all-ness of it is even worse. It is now even easier for early movers to continue reaping marginal rewards. It is a system designed to entrench and centralize power.

It’s actually one of the biggest points of Proof of STAKE. People put ETH on the line, a substantial risk, to act accordingly to the rules set by nodes. Early adopters and the most passionate reap the rewards by buying earlier, and securing the network. Higher price also means higher security as it makes it harder and harder for bad actors to buy ETH and attack the network.

Right, but it also means that any legitimate users who get in later and want to genuinely participate are put on a permanent backfoot. Because ethereum is deflationary, and because PoS ensures marginal rewards goes to the biggest scammers- sorry I mean "the most passionate"- then the people who have more will get more.

This is also a flaw shared by the actual real world economy used by big girls and boys. However, crypto has also innovated many many more flaws and insecurities. So I'd rather stick to the bad system we have now, vs the worse system designed by grifters who quite literally just do not understand fucking anything about sensible ways to organize people.

I don’t understand who is the one being “scammed” when a person runs a consensus and execution layer clients along with their 32 ETH? They attest and propose blocks so that users’ transactions get included in the blocks.

If you’re talking about the gas fees, that’s the pricing market at work, similar to toll fees for cars for highways. Layer 2s would be the train or megabuses on those highways - amortized gas costs by the number of people on them.

PoS ensures marginal rewards to everyone equally with the same percentage unlike Bitcoin. You either bought ETH at $8 a pop back in 2017, or you’re now buying it at $1850, but everyone will get ~3.3% rewards for staking. Not that much different from people buying stocks when it was lower and getting dividends.

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