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Ethereum operates under a permissionless proof-of-stake model, it has not been mineable since the Merge in 2022.

There are obviously large staking pools (including decentralized pools), but there is also a substantial community of people who stake from home on a validating node of their own. A good example is the EthStaker community on Reddit [1].

The compute and bandwidth requirements are very permissible (quad-core CPU, 16-32 GB memory, 2-4 TB SSD, 20/20 Mb/s), and the theoretical size of minimum stake has gone down substantially over time due to Rocket Pool [2].

[1] https://reddit.com/r/ethstaker/

[2] https://rocketpool.net/node-staking/rocket-pool-vs-solo-stak...

The names of SpaceX’s drone ships, such as “Of Course I Still Love You”, are from the Culture novels

The minimum staking amount is very close to zero. Of course, directly participating in consensus by having the opportunity of building blocks requires 32 ETH (≈$75k), or 16/8 ETH ($37k/$18k) if you run a pool for other people through e.g. the trustless Rocket Pool system.

The minimum cost to acquire an ASIC so that you can even _contribute_ to the consensus is very high (thousands), and to be profitable you have to have close to free electricity. The ironic thing is, that in PoW the "rich get richer" is abstracted away into a combination of economies of scale, and access to free/very cheap power. Plus all the e-waste and wasted power, whereas PoS runs on e-waste people run in their closet, pulling as little as sub-10 watts.

Exactly. Even the transaction costs aren't great:

"Actual transaction costs are estimated around 0.001 cent/tx (at high transaction rates, amortized over billions of transactions, excluding migration costs). Note that this is an early estimate -- and could thus easily be 10x higher." [1]

Transactions costing singular cents [2], and very soon fractions of a cent [3], are already doable on public rollups providing actual control of your own funds, with escape hatches in case the system sequencer falls over [4]. These are, of course, still under heavy development. If privacy is a requirement, there's a zk-rollup for that (or, just use Monero). Not to mention support for social recovery.

This is a very PoS-Ethereum-centric (and L2-scaling-centric) view. There are even cheaper chains that trade L1 decentralization for faster blocktimes, instant finality, and/or much cheaper fees.

[1] https://taler.net/en/faq.html

[2] https://l2fees.info/

[3] https://www.eip4844.com/

[4] https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary

Ethereum's clients (execution and consensus) are only really concerned about a sufficiently fast SSD, more specifically in terms of random IO. Any mid-tier SSD should work though: stick it to a Raspberry Pi (or a Rock 5B) and you'll be validating on a low-power arm board. Or grab a used micro-PC/NUC, as most people running home nodes do.

Ethereum could in theory be powered by a single 6 MW wind turbine

I have a major soft spot for Transmission, congrats!

I do overnight oats; in the morning, all you have to do is pop the lid.

* Wholegrain oats (1.5 to 2 dl)

* Greek yogurt (1.5 to 2 dl)

* Milk, skimmed/whole (3 dl)

Then, throw in whatever. A sliced banana or berries, honey, a pinch of vanilla extract. Prep it in the evening, chuck it into the fridge, and it's done in the morning.

And $0.26 in transaction fees, $0.04 of which went to the block proposing validator

Mev-boost, a piece of software that consensus clients delegate their block building to, is currently being used on mainnet. The difference is that there can be multiple block builder _relays_, such as Flashbots, bloXroute, Manifold Finance, and Blocknative.

These relays effectively accept bundles from MEV searchers, which are then sent to the validator running mev-boost as they propose their block.

https://boost.flashbots.net/

APY depends on the current validator count, decreasing as more validators come online. Currently, the base APY is around 4 %.

On top of that, you have to factor in luck: block proposals are randomly assigned to validators, and they include a random amount of tips depending on network activity. You could propose a block that nets you 0.01 ETH in tips, or a block with 50 ETH in tips.

On average, I believe the post-Merge APY has been estimated to be ≈6 % (non-cumulative).

Hardware can be anything. Even a RasPi 4 with 8 GB of memory can be made to work. Any old x64 machine with two or more cores works. 16 GB of memory is recommended, as is a 2 TB SSD to minimize down-time. Storage requirements are likely to go down in the medium-term, as e.g. state expiry get implemented.

I’d recommend an Intel NUC. They use laptop CPUs, so electricity consumption is around 5–20 watts. For networking, you’ll need around 5 Mb/s up and down after the initial sync.

Because stable currencies do not exist in the world of cryptos? Dai [1], Rai [2], and USDC [3] are some examples that are all stable, and all dramatically different from each other.

Fees are currently as low as $0.03 on Ethereum layer-2 solutions (!= side-chain) [4]. The fees will further fall as the technology improves, and once L1 gets (data-/dank-)sharding and other L2-scaling oriented upgrades.

[1] https://makerdao.com/en [2] https://reflexer.finance [3] https://www.circle.com/en/usdc [4] https://l2fees.info

A CBDC will eliminate any argument for crypto

So a US CBDC will be decentralized, permissionless, transparent, non-censoring, and run on open-source software based on an open specification?

How come? There's no speculation in stablecoins, USD-following or not. Especially if you transact on a layer-2 solution, it's quite convenient.

You can stake on a Raspberry Pi and an external SSD, if you hate yourself enough. Most home stakers run on micro-PCs like Intel NUCs or Optiplex Micros.

Attestations occur for every validator once every epoch, i.e. once every 6.4 minutes. It is not related to network activity in any way.

The validator that proposes the block with the slashing in it gets a small reward, while the rest is burnt. There are dedicated slashers on the network that observe attestations and block proposals for violations. They can either selfishly keep those observations until they can be included in a block, or broadcast them to the network so whoever is up next for proposal can slash the misbehaving validator. The whistleblowers themselves (altruistic slashers) get no reward, only the validator including it in a block does.

Block times become exactly 12 seconds, that's it. Nothing else changes: it's the same Ethereum, just greener and very slightly faster!

The current estimate for the upgrade can be found at [1]. It's not a regular upgrade that happens at a specific block height, hence the variance. Instead, the consensus is flipped over from PoW to PoS at a specific total difficulty, also known as mining difficulty. One of the reasons is to avoid miner attacks around the merge event.

[1] https://bordel.wtf/

Because not attesting is against the network's fork-choice rules. If that censoring majority chooses to avoid said block, because it contains transactions that should be censored, they will perform an illegal re-org around the block. Sure, it won't be "illegal" as a majority of the network follows said re-org.

It's an extremely nuanced topic, and it was extensively discussed in the last core-developer call on Thursday. Every single operator has been warned that going against the fork-choice rules could, and ultimately will, result in social mitigations against spec-deviating behavior.

This could be set of socially executed slashings of validators that don't respect the fork-choice rules, or an honest-minority executed hard-fork that effectively causes misbehaving validators to bleed until they start respecting the protocol's rules.

I could be wrong on multiple counts, especially regarding re-orgs, but this is how I've understood the issue.

You are wrong about the majority of validators having to approve a certain transaction for them to be included. Even if 80 % of the network were censoring, those transactions would, on average, make it into every fifth block.

I don't disagree. However, I see no reason why light clients would not become the default option, as they effectively remove the trust placed on an RPC provider.

Not to mention, a new groundwork for light clients was laid out in the first upgrade to the beacon chain. Come merge, clients could effectively poll for e.g. balances directly from the network, instead of going through Infura.

More on Ethereum light clients from Chainsafe, the builders of Lodestar, a Typescript implementation of an Ethereum consensus client: https://blog.chainsafe.io/the-road-ahead-for-ethereum-light-...

TL;DR: "Light clients enable more people to participate as first-class citizens, verifying on-chain data without relying on single and centralized JSON RPC endpoints."

There's a massive difference in the decentralization of Ethereum's PoS implementation vs. Cardano, which uses delegated PoS.

PoS is coming in ~a month, the upgrade dates date will be announced on Thursday.

Is there a reason to expect this time to be different?

Well...

- five+ different consensus clients, all with a full PoS implementation and a working PoW -> PoS transition mechanism

- four different execution clients, all with a working PoW -> PoS transition mechanism

- Multiple (dozen+) of successful merges on testnets and shadow forks. Ropsten, an ancient test network, was successfully merged to PoS from PoW a couple weeks ago.

There's two more existing testnets that will be merged soon. Sepolia on the 5th of July, and Goerli on some date TBD. If those are successful and there are no major issues found, it's time for mainnet.

These are all chains that support smart-contracts, meaning that services can be built on top of them! I don't know much about the DeFi ecosystem on other chains, but all of them should have at least _something_ going on.

Name another year that has had feature-ready clients across the board, with a working merge transition mechanism implemented across all of them. The proof-of-stake chain we're merging to was launched in December of 2020, and has been running since, with almost 400'000 validators currently.

Any Ethereum L2 that commits transaction bundles to the mainnet, plus anything on Binance's EVM chain, Cardano, Solana, Polkadot, Avalanche... They're all proof-of-stake or not based on PoW.

And, Ethereum will transition to PoS by this year, ideally in August. All of the popular nine Ethereum execution/consensus clients should be ready for the merge, and mainnet has already been test-merged five times successfully.

The first existing PoW testnet will be merged on the first week of June. After that, there's two testnets remaining that will be upgraded (Ropsten -> Goerli -> Sepolia), and then it's time for mainnet.

Stable coins don't have to be backed by dollars, e.g. Dai and MIM are over-collaterized with cryptos. Dai survived the fall from ~$2k Ether to ~$50 Ether, and never lost its peg.

the "nothing at stake" issue inherent to proof-of-stake systems

The "nothing at stake" problem was inherent to proof-of-stake more than six years ago. It has, since then, been solved on Ethereum (and Polkadot) with Slasher, which is a penalizing system that burns (a portion) of the stake of malevolent actors, and then kicks them off the consensus layer.

Ethereum's consensus layer has been live for 1.5 years now, and there have been 175 slashing events during that time [1]. Some have been misconfigurations by small pools, others have been caused by users running their keys twice on two different machines (causing double attestations and double block proposals).

[1] https://beaconcha.in/validators/slashings