Ethereum Plans To Cut Its Absurd Energy Consumption By 99 Percent (ieee.org)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Ethereum mining consumes a quarter to half of what Bitcoin mining does, but that still means that for most of 2018 it was using roughly as much electricity as Iceland. Indeed, the typical Ethereum transaction gobbles more power than an average U.S. household uses in a day. "That's just a huge waste of resources, even if you don't believe that pollution and carbon dioxide are an issue. There are real consumers -- real people -- whose need for electricity is being displaced by this stuff," says Vitalik Buterin, the 24-year-old Russian-Canadian computer scientist who invented Ethereum when he was just 18.

Buterin plans to finally start undoing his brainchild's energy waste in 2019. This year Buterin, the Ethereum Foundation he cofounded, and the broader open-source movement advancing the cryptocurrency all plan to field-test a long-promised overhaul of Ethereum's code. If these developers are right, by the end of 2019 Ethereum's new code could complete transactions using just 1 percent of the energy consumed today.

Comments

Re:Mining or Transactions?

[phantomfive]

You 'mine' a coin by processing a transaction. The person who processes the transaction gets free coins as a reward for doing the mining. For bitcoin, the reward gets smaller and smaller over time, until eventually there will be no new coins mined, and the transaction fees will increase to cover the cost of processing the transaction.

Re:You want to stop climate change?

[cathector]

How much electricity is required for banks to manage your FIAT money?

I'm guessing you didn't click through to this article with graphs related to that very question.
If one believes those graphs, and i see no reason not to,
here are the number of US Households which could be powered by the current energy consumption of various transaction networks:

bitcoin: 4.2 million
ethereum: 1 million
visa: 0.017 million

so visa is 1/200th as energy-consumptive than bitcoin. that's two orders of magnitude plus a factor of two.

that same page reports that a single bitcoin transaction, just one, consumes enough energy to power a US household for 15 days.

yeah, i think banning should be considered.

Re:You want to stop climate change?

[iggymanz]

you misconceive everything, and cherry picking the energy consumption of Hong Kong that has less than half the per capita consumption of USA person.

the 7 million in Hong Kong don't matter because miniscule to global consumption too.

And those alarmist articles that google bring up are what i was referring to when when I talked about the stupid false articles that claimed bitcoin the power consumption of Denmark, they misunderstood the IEEE article. They are incorrect, bitcoin instead only using the power of a large city.

I have no crypto currency holdings, I think they are a scam and stupid.

BUT, they have no impact on global energy consumption, they don't matter. Math proves it.