[tatertots1234]

Decentralized doesn’t mean everything is unregulated and out of reach of governments. USDC is pretty heavily regulated despite operating on top of, and featuring composability with, a decentralized network.

The value per watt concern does not apply to all consensus mechanisms.

[rglullis]

I wonder how many of the anti-crypto people will stop using this argument when Ethereum completes The Merge and we get rid of PoW. Specially the gamer crowd who will finally get access to cheap GPUs and will go on to collective "waste" orders of magnitude more energy playing games in comparison with the network of validators.

[giantrobot]

GPU mining is a lottery. No individual is likely to win the lottery, only pooled in aggregate is the likelihood of winning enough to offset the costs of participating. A GPU mining outfit is wasting shitloads of electricity every day trying to buy enough lottery tickets to pay the bills.

An individual buying a GPU is not wasting any electricity in the hope of winning a rendered frame of a game. Every watt used by the GPU is explicitly for the user's purpose. Applying some sort of moral judgement to an individual's use of their private property is ludicrous. It doesn't matter if a GPU is used to play a game, display a spreadsheet, or play back porn.

[rglullis]

The "lottery" is just a method to have the aligned incentives and secure the network. Without the miners, there would be no Blockchain. Every user of the blockchain benefits from the work from the miners. So if you have a problem with miners, you have a problem with all those that depend on them. But if you want to complain about the consumption patterns of this group, you open yourself for criticism for your consumption patterns as well. As long as you are actually paying for the electricity and energy you are consuming, I am not going to be judging you if you prefer to use with gaming, or by driving an huge SUV or flying every weekend to Las Vegas.

Still, I am glad that we are moving away from it and adopting PoS. Not only the system is more efficient, it also removes from the perma-bears one more talking point.

[giantrobot]

> As long as you are actually paying for the electricity and energy you are consuming.

For starters the price of electricity is not at all capturing all the negative externalities of generating that electricity. A miner paying a utility bill is not paying the entire cost of the energy used for mining.

Second, the vast majority of "work" performed by Proof of Work schemes is literally thrown away. It has absolutely zero utility and so is in the most literal sense just wasted electricity. Not only do they require waste but by design require increasing amounts of waste as the networks scale. They're not designed to improve or get more efficient.

Unless you're just running a game idly in the background, idling an SUV in the driveway, or idling a jet on the tarmac they're not wasting the resources used to run. They're serving at least some utility. An SUV or jet to Vegas might not be the best use of fuel for the task but they're not just wasting it. Neither an SUV or jet burns coal so even their energy usage has fewer negative externalities than a majority of blockchain miners.

Proof of Stake has been coming Real Soon Now to Ethereum for a few years now. It's still not here. Even with PoS it doesn't help matters if a majority of coins are still PoW and continue burning an Argentina worth of power.

[rglullis]

The migration to PoS is well under way. The whole path to ETH2.0 was full of setbacks and delays, but it was never vaporware as the critics would like to think.

Just this week the largest test network completed the migration successfully, despite the miners making efforts to destabilize it.

> majority of coins

You mean BTC. Well, the best way to get rid of BTC will not be by yelling at people about the energy "waste" (which again, it is not "wasted" if it fulfill its purpose securing the network, but you are free to disagree), it will be by supporting a better alternative compelling most people to migrate.