[sunshine-o]

Yes if you compare a proof of stake blockchains (most of them) and the banking industry, crypto has a far smaller environmental footprint.

Ethereum (since PoS) was designed to allow anybody to run a validator or even a full node out of modest hardware. The result is that the entire network probably has a smaller footprint than a single small/medium size bank.

[curiousObject]

>the entire network probably has a smaller footprint than a single small/medium size bank

What research or statistics can you suggest to bolster this argument?

[tripzilch]

While I can't confirm comparisons to a "small/medium size bank" specifically (cause I have no idea how), I can perhaps clarify a bit

Ethereum moved to proof-of-stake in 2022, and it was initially expected to use only 1% of the energy it used when it was proof-of-work.

Turned out they were under-estimating the savings. According to studies by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance and the Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute, Ethereum's 2022 switch to Proof-of-Stake reduced its global network energy consumption by over 99.98% overnight.

As far as I understand, this was made possible because the Ethereum protocol was set up to be made extensible like this (even though big changes like these are hard), while Bitcoin on the other hand, is stuck on proof-of-work forever, since its protocol does not allow for changing it.

[dlubarov]

There isn't really a technical difference that made PoS viable for Ethereum but not Bitcoin; it's a hard fork in either case. The differences are more cultural -

- For better or worse, Ethereum has more centralized leadership (mainly the EF) which helps coordinate upgrades. Hard forks happen pretty regularly, and don't typically risk fracturing the community, unless the changes are particularly controversial (see Ethereum Classic).

- PoS wasn't that controversial, since it was planned from the beginning (see the difficulty bomb). Some users still resisted the switch - see the EthereumPoW fork - but for the most part the community was on board.

- The Bitcoin community OTOH values ossification. It rarely accepts proposed hard forks as "still Bitcoin"; that has only happened a few times in its history. The community's response to most proposed hard forks is "interesting, but that's not Bitcoin, call it something else."

- The Bitcoin community is also more ideologically and economically invested in PoW, so a proposed PoS fork would be extremely controversial, and would fracture the community (at best, if it gained any traction at all).

[Ferret7446]

The centralization and PoS makes Ethereum unsafe. What's the point of moving from a currency that a government can unilaterally control to a currency that the Ethereum board/stakers can unilaterally control?

The point of PoW is that it resists monopolization unlike PoS.

[dlubarov]

The centralized leadership has no hard power though; the community normally goes along with changes they propose because they're normally sensible. If they go rogue, people will stop following their proposals.

In Vitalik's words: "If someone puts a gun to my head and tells me to write a hard-fork patch, I will definitely write it. If I publish a patch to delete a bunch of accounts, how many people here would download and install the update and switch to that chain? I see relatively few raised hands. This is called decentralization"

[sunshine-o]

There are about 8k validators [0].

Validators are low requirements, in the RPI ballpark and and a lot if them are combined on a single host.

Then you also need some full nodes to access the data or submit transactions. So you can consider them part of the core infrastructure and those have higher requirements in terms of bandwidth and speed/capacity of storage but also CPU. But still a mini PC is fine.

Let's say a bank have 10k employees, you already might need more computer power just with their "laptops".

Now Ethereum is a global network competing with all the network of banks all around the world. So you can do a quick calculation its footprint is magnitude lower.

- [0] https://probelab.io/ethereum/