> You can literally run an Ethereum PoS node in a Raspberry Pi.
I know one of the stated goals is for people to be able to run validators on commodity hardware, and as you've pointed out, builds exist for ARM devices and have been shown to run on a Raspberry Pi, but it remains to be seen if you can "in practice" run a mainnet validator on a Raspberry Pi. That would be ideal, though!
There is a decent group of folks in the rocketpool community that are doing this right now, running their nodes with 8gb pi 4's, running mainnet validators. The main dev of the rocketpool node stack has put a lot of work into making it viable, including pushing the client teams to ship better optimised arm docker builds.
It is somewhat risky in my opinion as you don't have the resources to track multiple chain heads in the event of a split, but it does work under nominal chain circumstances.
The irony here is that long term, ETH will use ASICs for zk-snarks. Vitalik just published a document where he said that is his preference [1].
"Type 1 aims to replicate Ethereum exactly, and so it has no way of mitigating these inefficiencies. At present, proofs for Ethereum blocks take many hours to produce. This can be mitigated either by clever engineering to massively parallelize the prover or in the longer term by ZK-SNARK ASICs. ... Personally, my hope is that everything becomes Type 1 over time, through a combination of improvements in ZK-EVMs and improvements to Ethereum itself to make it more ZK-SNARK-friendly."
They will need to financially incentivize people to run this hardware and will create an arms race around it. Just like Bitcoin.
The demand for zk-prover hardware will be no where near the same extent as for pow miners. Those zk proofs only need to be generated once, by a single party, and then they can be verified, easily and cheaply by anyone with minimal hardware. There isn't anywhere near the competitive rat race to accumulate as much hardware as possible.
The more people mining in proof of work, the more random hashes needed to secure a block. This is what makes it demand so much energy.
This isn’t the case with ZK provers. Each computation yields a solution, like regular fixed arithmetic math. Using more powerful FPGAs and adding more parallel provers, you can prove the same circuits in less time and less energy.
The more people using ETH, the more computation that will need to be done. The more hardware that will be needed to support everything. The end goal is scalability, right?
Yes, like computers, the internet, electric trains. Computers used to take up a room and compute a few thousand cycles per second. Now they can fit in our pockets and compute billions of cycles per second.
As hardware accelerated and parallel ZK proving technology increases, the amount of users and applications built on this technology can also increase. This is the opposite of Proof of Work, where more efficient mining rigs and higher hash rates will not lead to more network throughput or activity.
I'm saying that zk is being targeted for ASICs (Vitalik said it himself) and that zk will require some very specific compute needs that not everyone is going to be able to provide.
Sure, we are in agreement then. It is a great thing as it will enable the blockchain to continue to scale for more users and more applications, and it is the opposite of the energy inefficiencies of the current PoW system.
Well... I do think that the power usage overall isn't going to go down. Certainly ETH switching off PoW will be a great reset, but over time... people will find ways to continue to use more power when it comes to compute. Put it another way, the datacenter market isn't getting smaller any time soon.
To put this in perspective, there are hundreds of thousands of validators already online and the amount of energy consumed by them while running is less than the energy consumed by videogame consoles around the world while idling.
Every gamer (PC or console) that has used the "look at how much energy is being wasted" argument to be anti-crypto will have to eat their GPUs after the merge.
Then it is an issue of bitcoin and all the PoW blockchains, not of crypto in general.
You can be pro-crypto without being in favor of Bitcoin, you know? In fact, those who oppose crypto due to environmental concerns would help immensely if they stopped generalizing and became more specific about their arguments.
And Friendster was once the largest social network and the first successful one. Your point?
Bitcoin was a good first prototype, but it is clearly a failed experiment. It's not used as a currency, the "store of value" narrative is bogus. All it took was the first asset bubble to pop to demonstrate how BTC is only correlated with other stock prices.
It already loses to Ethereum in many metrics: transaction volume, number of wallets, decentralization (number of nodes participating in block validation) and so on. Layer-2 systems in Ethereum hold more Wrapped Bitcoin than lightning by orders of magnitude. Even if you really want to use BTC, the best way to transact bitcoin today is by wrapping it and using it on Ethereum.
Bitcoin is not going to go away just because lots of people criticize it. Bitcoin is only going to go away when we build an alternative that has (most) of its (perceived) benefits and fewer of its drawbacks.
IOW, stop criticizing "crypto" and start focusing on criticizing "Bitcoin". Be specific about your arguments, otherwise everyone will feel like they are on a Mexican standoff and you will never get the support to win the good fight.
The chief perceived benefit of Bitcoin is its speculative asset value. We may try to unseat this with a new, less environmentally harmful speculative asset, but it's unethical to deliberately attempt to suck people into a negative-sum scheme, plus it won't work: crypto coins move in tandem with each other.
You are reversing cause and effect. The original promise of Bitcoin was to become a p2p payment system that could be an alternative (not a replacement) for cash. All of the speculation around it comes from that.
The unethical thing is to keep BTC around just because there are so many sunk costs associated with it.
Friendster isn't currently the largest social network. The point is that people associate the biggest product of the category with the category itself. Like web search is synonymous with Google.
the problem though is that the argument is unhelpful and disingenuous at that point: people--apparently including yourself--argue against "crypto" painting a broad brush because of how a handful of projects work. Are you against the concept of chat applications as a whole due to the privacy issues of the dominating players? If so, that would suck, as there are certainly projects in the space of chat that don't exhibit those properties. But when you just go around yelling "crypto is bad because X" when X isn't really a property of crypto you might emotionally feel justified but hopefully you know that intellectually you are holding back progress with FUD.
Ether market cap alone is about 50% of Bitcoin's (~230 vs ~470 billion USD).
Look at Coingecko's list of ERC20 tokens, all of the top 60 tokens have a market cap above $1 billion. You can go ahead and remove Tether if you want, there is still another ~$100B there.
Bitcoin is not so dominant as the maxis would like to believe. It won't take much for Ethereum (as an ecosystem) to catch up, and when it does the flippening will come fast.
Regulations will take care of that. I expect that bitcoin will either be banned, or miners will be forced to reduce their computations, or users will be required to pay a pollution tax at exchanges. Move to greener chain if you have bitcoin, that’s my advice
If the Merge works (and PoS chains remain secure), then it'll be proof in practice that PoW is unnecessarily wasteful, so regulators have extra incentive to scrutinize Bitcoin.
You can literally run an Ethereum PoS node in a Raspberry Pi.
Source: https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/