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

Posted by BeauHD on from the Ctrl-+-Z dept.

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.

5 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. Regulation is needed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    Regulation is needed to prevent wasteful consumption of energy. Not only does the energy use exacerbate climate change, but the infrastructure costs to generate the necessary electricity get passed along to everyone through higher fees and taxes. Some also drive up costs of useful goods like GPUs, harming consumers who would otherwise use them for more productive purposes. Cryptocurrency produces no tangible value of its own, such as a useful good or service. It's far less efficient than centralized transaction processing systems, and offers no fraud protection to its users. It's far costlier and provides far less value. Regulators should give cryptocurrencies a choice: voluntarily curb your resource use dramatically or effectively be banned. I propose taxing all Bitcoin transactions and capital gains at 1000% until the energy consumption is brought within reasonable levels.

  2. Supply and demand by thegarbz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    99% reduction in energy demand? Doesn't that mean 99% reduction in required workload and thus either a 99% reduction in the core value of the coin or more likely a 10000% factor increase in the number of people who now have an interest in your new super cheap to mine coin?

    1. Re:Supply and demand by supremebob · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Not really. They are planning on switching from a Proof Of Work algorithm that requires "mining" coins with brute force mathematical computations to a Proof Of Stake algorithm where the largest crypto holders who help with processing network transactions get a cut of the transaction fees.

      The algorithm seems to be much more energy efficient, but tends to favor giving more coins to the few people who already have the most of it. In a way, it tends to work more like fiat currency than gold mining... the rich tend to get richer off the interest, and the rest of us just tend of stagnate where we are.

  3. Re:You want to stop climate change? by nwaack · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I didn't misconceive a damn thing. Bitcoin uses more energy than Hong Kong, which has over 7 million people. Beyond that, the network is mostly fueled by coal-fired power plants in China so the carbon footprint is massive. Combine that with all the other silly cryptocurrencies and we've got a real problem.

    A quick Google search found many scientific articles about how crypto mining is contributing to climate change at alarming rates, so it looks the person who needs to "get it through your skull" is you.

    Sorry you're butthurt that your crappy investment in crypto isn't paying off, hypocrite.

  4. Re:You want to stop climate change? by sonamchauhan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    He gave us a solid number (10 TW-hr/yr out of 130,000) - which I am grateful for. So he understands. But he does not accept 1 out of 13000 is too large a proportion of a resource used by 7 billion people.

    That spike in demand (often localised) causes negative effects - people without electricity, higher power prices, outages affect operation theatres... that sort of stuff. Eventually, we run out of non-renewables faster.

    The Eth inventor accepts this.