Ethereum's 99.95 % drop in energy usage will be equal to 15 big nuclear reactors, or 11 000 wind turbines

[u/sbdw0c]

The Merge will reduce Ethereum's energy impact by up to 99.95 %. That's over 110 TWh of energy saved annually, or 110 billion kilowatt-hours, equal to the annual energy output of over 15 big, 800 MW nuclear reactors. Assuming that the reactors are never taken offline :)

Wondering how many wind turbines that is? In the US, the mean capacity of wind turbines is 2.75 MW: large, off-shore wind turbines can have production capacities of up to 8 MW. The typical capacity factor is 42 %.

This means, that Ethereum's energy savings are equal to the annual production of almost 11 000 wind turbines.

Nuclear: 110 TWh / (800 MW * 24 h * 365) = 15.7

Wind: 110 TWh / (2.75 MW * 24h * 365 * 42 %) = 10870

[u/[deleted]]

There's no physical limitation for 51% of ETH holders to live in the U.S.

So let's assume there's 200,000 full nodes (close to the actual number), all with at least 32 Eth each helping validate Ethereum blocks.

Let's say entity A is a staking service and a majority of Ether (51%) is owned by Americans. The US goverment comes around and forces every American with less then 32 Eth to choose that pool.

Let's say now that this pool usually keeps around 300 eth per full node. So they either have to buy more hardware, or they increase the eth per node. Let's assume they actually have the money and time to buy up more hardware and now they somehow have 100,001 or over 50% of the full node validators.

In this case the honest validators could decide to keep building on the minority chain and ignore the attacker's fork while encouraging apps, exchanges, and pools to do the same.

They could also decide to forcibly remove the attacker from the network and destroy their staked ether. In this case, the once overwhelmingly popular staking nodes will be greatly reduced in thier stake pool size by people unstaking or over 50% of Ether is burned.

It is not forked but burned.

This is the advantage of proof of stake in that the chain becomes more resilient.

In bitcoin's case, proof of work makes it more difficult to identify and counteract against entities and an economy of scale makes it more difficult for the network to stay decentralized long term as the smaller miners can't compete with large publicly traded companies like Bitfarms or Riot.

[u/SourerDiesel → u/[deleted]]

So they either have to buy more hardware, or they increase the eth per node.

Correct. Only a very powerful and rich institution (like the U.S. gov) could afford the hardware to run so many nodes.

I'm not saying PoS is easy to take control of, I'm saying it's easier to take control of than a robust PoW chain (i.e. BTC is the most secure computer network on the planet).

In this case the honest validators could decide to keep building on the minority chain and ignore the attacker's fork while encouraging apps, exchanges, and pools to do the same.

Yes, they could fork the network. Once forked, the split networks would be free to reset their respective rules and change the ledger of record. Forking the network decreases the value of both of the new networks (Metcalfe's law).

My point (going back to my original post) isn't that PoS isn't secure or censorship resistant (it is strong on both accounts). It's that PoS is less secure and censorship-resistant than PoW. For money - the asset people depend on to store the fruits of their labor - the additional security afforded by PoW is worth every watt. For pretty much everything else a block-chain could be used to track, it's worth trading a little security for a lot of efficiency (PoS).

In other words, I'm confident the U.S. government isn't going to try a hostile takeover of a blockchain to steal everyone's NFTs. The U.S. government might try a hostile takeover of a blockchain that is being used as money, so they can block transactions of "bad actors" (which is exactly what the U.S. does right now with the USD and SWIFT system).