> Validators don’t need energy-intensive computers in order to participate in a proof-of-stake system – just a laptop or smart phone. This will make Ethereum better for the environment.
To me, this is the biggest win of proof-of-stake over proof-of-work.
I wonder if we’ll actually see flight from PoW cryptocurrencies to PoS at rates sufficient to reduce the current environmental impact. Anecdotally, a lot of the people I know who were early in Bitcoin are talking more about PoS coins as the natural progression and PoW as doomed tech. But until I actually see the transition happen, I remain (optimistically) skeptical.
Agreed. However it still is dominated by the "haves" vs the "have nots". Proof of stake is awarded to those with the largest stakes, which favors state-sponsored miners and works against decentralization.
I like how Monero's RandomX is designed to level the playing field: ASIC miners don't significantly improve over CPU mining so more people can participate in mining. Of course, this doesn't address pools, but it is a start.
I would argue that under both proof of stake and mining your income is always directly proportional to the amount invested, either in equipment or stake.
The main difference is the minimum barrier to entry, however under PoS you have access to various pooling services, which simulate consumer scale mining (complete with the associated inefficiency).
>However it still is dominated by the "haves" vs the "have nots". Proof of stake is awarded to those with the largest stakes, which favors state-sponsored miners and works against decentralization.
where is the difference to mining? To mine you need GPUs and electricity which you can equate to $$$, just like capital you lock up under PoS. it effectively makes no difference.
and everyone earns the same percentages, whales only earn more in absolute terms.
> Proof of stake is awarded to those with the largest stakes, which favors state-sponsored miners and works against decentralization.
Hopefully it won't be too bad. Here you can see the current involvement from different parties in the beacon chain https://beaconcha.in/charts
Currently "others" is ~52%, Kraken is 2nd with ~17%
I'm trying to understand a similar graph for Cardano (another PoS chain), but not sure I can tell anything from it about the distribution. https://cardano.bytemaniac.net/istoria/
I am a solo staker and its been a blast learning about PoS and participating in the community. Right now you can earn ~7.8% rewards if you lock up your eth on your own validator. Once EIP1559 goes live (July) and the full transition to PoS merge around the end of the year there are some folks on the ETH research team who see rewards conservatievly going to ~25% [1]
What does the process for staking actually look like? I remember setting up lightning a bunch of years ago and ended up losing some fractions of BTC by messing things up along the way.
Is there something foolproof for staking right now, or is it a lot of "git clone this repo, copy this address to a config file" etc.
The staking base rewards will go down as more stakers stake eth, however, after the merge to PoS (End of year target) fee revenue will be awarded to stakers in addition to the primary staking rewards.
Reading through the FAQ on staking it says you will get penalties for being offline and the network eats through 800mb/hour which comes out to around 576gb/month.
Is this practical to do at home? Or are pools the way to go for people on consumer home internet?
The penalties for being offline are equal to the rewards you would have earned. It is okay to be offline if you have minor outage for few hours or if you're moving and will be offline for a few days. You simply would need to go back online for the same amount of time to make your rewards back.
I am a solo staker. My machine churns through about 800 gb/month. I am a huge advocate for solo staking if you have the hardware and have technical ability. I work in finance not software engineering, and i was able to set a machine up with no issue.
Check out the link below if you would like more resources or if you have any questions!
If you have a gaming desktop and do a complete system wipe, you will be downloading several terabytes of data in backups and games.
Most AAA games these days are in 100GB range, and a steam library of my friends occupies a couple of TB. Also Dropbox / Onedrive give you 1TB of space, and is easy to fill it up with videos and photos.
A continous stream of 1.7 megabits, seems reasonable on both FTTC and FTTH, and maybe even on a xDSL. Definately more systainable than GPU mining
It's pretty much guaranteed at this point. The staking network has been running since Dec. 1, with over 3% of all ETH staked so far. The initial migration is simple to implement and a high priority for the devs. Community support is very high, and once everybody switches to the new fork the miners have no influence.
The miners could keep running the old PoW chain but it's unlikely to have significant value. Exchanges will support the PoS chain and some are already offering staking services. Tokens collateralized by off-chain assets will use the PoS chain. Etc.
With the PoW chain having little value, miners will be deeply unprofitable and most of them will have to quit. Moving to other chains isn't much of an option because other GPU chains have little aggregate value.
There is a high likelihood of a fork, but forks aren't necessarily harmful to Eth. The "rebelling" miners can't actually do anything to the proof of stake system.
The real people who decide what fork wins are the exchanges and users, and those people have no real reason to stick with PoW.
Miners will rebel and continue mining, some will mine on an ETH fork and others switch to other coins. GPUs will not be returned to gamers anytime soon.
Theoretically the ETH PoW fork will drop in value relative to the original ETH. That would decrease the mining reward and result in less mining (and more GPUs returned to gamers).
Staking can be pooled just like regular POW mining pools. However unlike POW mining pools you have to give the majority of your funds to a trusted party whereas with POW mining the maximum you can loose is the unpaid balance between payouts which is usually some days worth of mining.
there will be decentralized & trustless staking pools such as RocketPool, where even if a loss of funds occurs the loss is subsidized through the entire protocol.
From what I understand, you risk getting margin called if the value of ethereum drops below the loan amount, so wouldn't you potentially need a large cash pool to offset that risk anyway?
You can stake with Avalanche (AVAX) today for a smaller price which will be decreased in near future. ETH like all other classical nakamoto algorithms have a limit on number of participants in consensus. Avalanche has no such limit on decentralization without sacrificing security or throughput.
Yeah, i'm working on multichain stuff now, and i've pretty much dropped geth/ganache for avalanchego for running simulations… really can't compete with the innovation on the consensus layer… and all the security tradoffs put forth in the eth l2's can be done with coreth for even more "scalability".
With the fracturing taking place now in the eth ecosytem, its only a matter of time avalanche sees more adoption just purely on the technical capability basis.
there is in fact a fast-merge proposal that has community & dev support with a preemptive date of October 2021, if we're conservative February 2022. Once the merge happened PoW will be shut down and all transactions will be validated by the Proof of Stake consensus.
Readit News
> Validators don’t need energy-intensive computers in order to participate in a proof-of-stake system – just a laptop or smart phone. This will make Ethereum better for the environment.
To me, this is the biggest win of proof-of-stake over proof-of-work.
I like how Monero's RandomX is designed to level the playing field: ASIC miners don't significantly improve over CPU mining so more people can participate in mining. Of course, this doesn't address pools, but it is a start.
Yay proof of stake!
The main difference is the minimum barrier to entry, however under PoS you have access to various pooling services, which simulate consumer scale mining (complete with the associated inefficiency).
where is the difference to mining? To mine you need GPUs and electricity which you can equate to $$$, just like capital you lock up under PoS. it effectively makes no difference.
and everyone earns the same percentages, whales only earn more in absolute terms.
Hopefully it won't be too bad. Here you can see the current involvement from different parties in the beacon chain https://beaconcha.in/charts
Currently "others" is ~52%, Kraken is 2nd with ~17%
I'm trying to understand a similar graph for Cardano (another PoS chain), but not sure I can tell anything from it about the distribution. https://cardano.bytemaniac.net/istoria/
[1] https://twitter.com/drakefjustin/status/1384124998084792324?...
Is there something foolproof for staking right now, or is it a lot of "git clone this repo, copy this address to a config file" etc.
Is this practical to do at home? Or are pools the way to go for people on consumer home internet?
The penalties for being offline are equal to the rewards you would have earned. It is okay to be offline if you have minor outage for few hours or if you're moving and will be offline for a few days. You simply would need to go back online for the same amount of time to make your rewards back.
I am a solo staker. My machine churns through about 800 gb/month. I am a huge advocate for solo staking if you have the hardware and have technical ability. I work in finance not software engineering, and i was able to set a machine up with no issue.
Check out the link below if you would like more resources or if you have any questions!
https://www.reddit.com/r/ethstaker/
I don't think I can do staking at home because Comcast would shut me down if I start using 800gb/mo
Most AAA games these days are in 100GB range, and a steam library of my friends occupies a couple of TB. Also Dropbox / Onedrive give you 1TB of space, and is easy to fill it up with videos and photos.
A continous stream of 1.7 megabits, seems reasonable on both FTTC and FTTH, and maybe even on a xDSL. Definately more systainable than GPU mining
If I have 32ETH but don't want to run this on my home internet, how do you compare pools because the fees are all over the place?
The miners could keep running the old PoW chain but it's unlikely to have significant value. Exchanges will support the PoS chain and some are already offering staking services. Tokens collateralized by off-chain assets will use the PoS chain. Etc.
With the PoW chain having little value, miners will be deeply unprofitable and most of them will have to quit. Moving to other chains isn't much of an option because other GPU chains have little aggregate value.
The real people who decide what fork wins are the exchanges and users, and those people have no real reason to stick with PoW.
With the fracturing taking place now in the eth ecosytem, its only a matter of time avalanche sees more adoption just purely on the technical capability basis.
https://launchpad.ethereum.org/en/
Deleted Comment
https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/trading-and-funding/st...
Still will have high gas fees.