Bitcoin / Bitcoins / Crypto Currency

Just to add, the cause of this environmental impact is purely economy based. Miners mine Bitcoin to make money. The solution has also to be economical. To make it more profitable to abandon PoW and move to PoS. Thats the angle I'm attacking it from.

I'm writing a feature about PoS/PoW in coming weeks, so email me if you have anyone I should speak to. Address is in Twitter bio.

Have just pinged you an email

Eth is switching to POS, once that happens bitcoin will basically be the only POW crypto, which will obviously never change.

Eth is switching to POS

All eyes on Eth to see how they are going to do it.

If ETH wants to switch to PoS, they have to stop people mining it. How are they going to do that if they are still making money? If eth switches to PoS, what is stopping the miners continuing to mine and just forking the chain and carrying on as normal? Why would a miner who has spent $250m on mining hardware just suddenly accept that eth is PoS now?

The same goes for Bitcoin. Bitcoin could change their code to be PoS in a few hours. They'd still need 50%+ of the miners to abandon their multi billion dollar investments and stop mining.

Eth is switching to POS

They've been saying that for years.

Bitcoin has already been forked (lite coin and it has a current value of £143 vs bitcoin £42k)
Etherium has already been forked in the past (Eth classic £8 vs £1300)

I think that developers and users will have more of a say in which fork of Eth gets used than miners.

What special meaning of users do you have that doesn't include miners?

The move to PoS for Ethereum is gonna take ages I think. I've moved into Cardano for now. The project looks very promising. A very charismatic founder, 100% decentralisation tommorow and a big deal with the government of Ethiopia

BTC has forked at least 20 times. Including to PoS before. And the users didn't follow because they follow the money. And the money, at the moment, is backing PoW.

I think that developers and users will have more of a say in which fork of Eth gets used than miners.

I do think this is correct though. Its not possible to stop miners mining Eth or BTC but its possible to change user perception to support more evironmentally sound reforms.

I'm talking about Eth - which is the most used blockchain

here are the daily fees people are paying to use various crypto tokens. 9 of the top 10 are based on Etherium.

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Worth also mentioning the poitical reasons for PoW being the defacto standard. China quite enjoys controlling 70%+ of the Bitcoin network while the West gradually adopts it.

That doesn't answer the question.

Users are spending $45m+ a day using Etherium based applications but you deny there are any users, only miners?

Not sure I get what you're asking sorry.

Those fees are driven by a broken system, gas fees are outrageous at the moment, as soon as a cheaper alternative comes along people will jump on it, who wants to do a low value transaction and pay massive gas fees

when eth 2.0 comes it may reduce gas fees which again is a reason for users and developers to abandon the POW ship.

Worth noting though that litecoin forked to try and solve this same issue by increasing the block size but it means you need super computers to run a node (rather than say a raspberry pi). Which means there are currently only 100 nodes on the litecoin network which means its no longer decentralised in the same way bitcoin is. I don't really know what will happen with eth 2.0 but my original point was that if its better then users will dictate if old eth dies rather than miners.

BTC is a whole different bag as its not 'used' by users and is a store of wealth so miners probably do have a bigger say as there is less incentive to move to something else.

Don't know if you have seen this piece but tackles some of the themes you are looking at, in particular its use of non-rival energy and potential of PoS
https://medium.com/@nic__carter/noahbjectivity-on-bitcoin-mining-2052226310cb

you deny there are users, only miners

No, I pointed out that miners are also users.

Thanks, hadn't seen that. Will read a bit later.

Fun fact....when you start a bitcoin node it downloads a seed list from something called a seed node. There are six seed nodes hardcoded into the bitcoin core wallet. Take out those six nodes and that's Bitcoin temporarily dead.

Each of the six is operated by different bitcoin Foundation members.

Anyone got anything interesting to shill?

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(sorry, wrong thread)

HBAR looks cheap. Not financial advice.

Seconded. Although it's already had a fair run – bought £50 last year on a punt and it's now worth £400. Only wish I'd bought moarrrr...

Well dips keep life interesting...