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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.

46 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. Mining or Transactions? by Vanyle · · Score: 1

    Is this going to make it easier to mine, or is it only going to help with transactions? I though that the majority of energy was in the process of trying to mine the next coin, not verifying transactions. Would this be akin to saying we are going to cut energy consumption by using lower-resistance power lines?

    1. Re:Mining or Transactions? by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    2. Re:Mining or Transactions? by CoolCash · · Score: 1

      Technically they are right since you get a reward for winning the right to create the block in the blockchain, hence processing the transactions you get a reward. Its not 1 coin, but 12.5 coins per block of transactions.

    3. Re:Mining or Transactions? by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      Hmm, not quite, but I see why you phrase it that way even though it's not quite correct.

      This is probably the most useless comment I've read in a while. Aren't you the smart one.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    4. Re:Mining or Transactions? by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      Right, but it's not actually "mined" in processing the blockchain transaction ledger though you are rewarded for that. So it's a distinction with a small difference.

      I'm seriously interested if you are even capable of expressing how it is mined.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    5. Re:Mining or Transactions? by LordKronos · · Score: 2

      I'm not sure what the difference is. I'll admit I'm not familiar with the internals of Etherium, though I was under the impression it was pretty much the same as Bitcoin (which I am familiar with). In Bitcoin, the "mining" aspect is to take a bunch of transactions and stuff them into a fixed size block, and then repeatedly hash that over and over each time with a different nonce appended until the hashed result matched a preset value or range. The "mining" process is the act of hashing until you find the right nonce. When you do, the transactions that you hashed are then considered processed. The one gotcha there is that because of the distributed nature and the fact that someone else could've minded a block at the exact same time as you, the processed transaction is only considered "verified" after a certain number of additional blocks are mined (at which point it becomes statistically unlikely for a competing blockchain to invalidate the mined block)

      So mining and processing transactions really go hand in hand. Doing one is the same as doing the other.

    6. Re:Mining or Transactions? by Vanyle · · Score: 1

      So if there are no transactions available the processors cannot make new coins?

    7. Re:Mining or Transactions? by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      That's a good question, I'd have to look at the source code to be sure. You might be able to just do an "empty" transaction (that is, a block with no transactions in it).

      In practice, if that ever happened, a processor could just send some money to themselves to make a transaction.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  2. You want to stop climate change? by nwaack · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Ban all cryptocurrency mining and transactions. Seriously. It is beyond insane that we, the human race, allow this idiocy to continue.

    1. Re:You want to stop climate change? by nwaack · · Score: 1

      Um, no. I said they should ban all cryptocurrency mining and transactions...at least until the energy used by ALL of them is many orders of magnitude less than it is now. Reading comprehension > you.

    2. Re:You want to stop climate change? by CoolCash · · Score: 2

      How much electricity is required for banks to manage your FIAT money? all the costs of ATM's, Brick and mortar buidings, etc.

    3. Re:You want to stop climate change? by iggymanz · · Score: 2

      nonsense. you have a huge misconception.

      the energy taken by cryptocurrency is miniscule. Civilization uses 132,000 TW hours per year, yet Etherium is only using 10 TW hours per year. It doesn't matter. Neither does bitcoin, you believed the nonsense article run here that misunderstood an IEEE article, saying that someday Bitcoin would consume as much as Denmark at (then) rate of growth...even while also saying its energy consumption was like a large city at the time.

      So get it through your skull, your banking firms use more energy than cryptocurrency. internet porn uses more. social media uses more. you know, those things you use, you hypocrite.

    4. Re:You want to stop climate change? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Less than if all of it would be managed through bitcoin. Several orders of magnitude.

    5. Re:You want to stop climate change? by cathector · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    6. 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.

    7. Re:You want to stop climate change? by nwaack · · Score: 1

      I'm not recommending that it be banned because I don't like it. I'm recommending it be banned because it's using insane amounts of energy and offers almost no real advantages.

    8. Re:You want to stop climate change? by iggymanz · · Score: 1, Informative

      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.

    9. Re:You want to stop climate change? by Jumperalex · · Score: 1

      No need to ban mining. Ban use in transactions and you make it worthless. Boom, no one will mine it except for the darkest of web transactions and even then probably not. But if they do it'll be so few as to not matter AND have enough of a power density footprint it'll be easy to detect like grow houses. Then just start jacking up their electricity rates until they stop. Not even a need to raid or fine just keep collecting via their electric bill >;-)

      --
      If you can't be good, be good at it!
    10. Re:You want to stop climate change? by Jumperalex · · Score: 1

      If you don't understand the difference in the War on Drugs and the War on Cryptomining it isn't worth explaining it.

      --
      If you can't be good, be good at it!
    11. 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.

    12. Re:You want to stop climate change? by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 1

      "Allow"? As if we should go into people's houses and check on how they're using their electricity? This environmental totalitarianism is gaining strength and it is a very big worry.

      --
      Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
    13. Re:You want to stop climate change? by thegarbz · · Score: 2

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

      By what metric? In total usage yes, but that ignores utility. Bitcoin processes 1/600th of the transactions every day compared to Visa with their current 1/200th energy consumption.

      Therefore Visa is actually as 1/120000th as energy-consumptive for achieving the same goal, moving money from point A to B.

      It is clear the world will not achieve net zero carbon emissions for energy generation, so reducing consumption should be a great part of the focus. I agree with your sentiment that banning should be considered.

    14. Re:You want to stop climate change? by Hallux-F-Sinister · · Score: 1

      While you’re at it, ban all human activities that you think are pointless and/or wasteful, and never mind the whole “freedom” fad... no one ever really cared about self-determinacy anyway.

      The very existence of cryptocurrencies is a response to problems people perceive in how our economic systems work that don’t involve barricades in streets and overturned burning automobiles, factories being broken into and set alight, and rich people being dragged out of their houses and beaten to death with clubs, or burned at impromptu stakes, or beheaded, etc.

      Not sure which I prefer, and... shit... Would you look at that, I’m all out of marshmallows!

      --
      Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
    15. Re:You want to stop climate change? by cathector · · Score: 1

      excellent point.

  3. Re:Regulation is needed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1


    Regulation is needed to prevent wasteful consumption of energy.

    We have that already in most countries. It's called the Public Utilities Commission. You can use whatever power you want in your home (obviously up to the level of service you have), but try the same thing on an industrial scale, and you start running into utility companies saying yes/no. Utilities have to answer to the PUC.

  4. Re:Regulation is needed by Lanthanide · · Score: 1

    Cryptocurrency produces no tangible value of its own, such as a useful good or service.

    Ahh yes, the usual Slashdot ignorance of saying "Cryptocurrency" when you really mean "Bitcoin".

    99% of cryptocurrencies are useless, including Bitcoin, but there are others that aren't. Ethereum is one of them.

  5. 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 dhasenan · · Score: 2

      They are switching to proof-of-stake instead of proof-of-work. Instead of using all the compute resources required to calculate a hard problem on every participating machine all the time, your computer gets to sit idle for most of the time. When you and your friends get your turn to process transactions (which is based on how rich you are), you get a portion of the transaction fees.

      This allows Ethereum to be only a couple thousand times more expensive per transaction than Visa, and with a fraction of the features.

    2. 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:Supply and demand by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      Etherium doesn't really rely too much on mining. 70% of the available currency was mined before it even went public. The energy consumption is mostly transaction processing, which is rewarded. The currency part is really just a way to encourage people to dedicate resources to running the distributed scripts that operate on the platform.

      At least that's my understanding of it.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    4. Re:Supply and demand by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      Cheers for the explanation.

    5. Re:Supply and demand by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      you will be able to participate in a proof of stake even with very little ethereum. The goal is to create staking pools, like you have mining pools for POW. If you participate in a pool that behaves correctly you get a reward per validated transaction proportional to your share in the stake pool. Seems fair. OTOH if you participate in a stake pool that misbehaves you lose your stake. This builds a network of trust between stake pools.

    6. Re:Supply and demand by TeknoHog · · Score: 1

      Proof Of Stake ... 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.

      IMHO, a fixed percentage interest is fair. The rich don't get proportionally any richer because everyone's balance increases by the same factor. This is also how Proof of Stake in cryptocurrencies has worked since it was introduced in Peercoin around 2012.

      The problem with Ethereum is that you need a minimum balance in order to gain any interest. The rich will get proportionally richer, for no good reason. This idea is similar to masternodes used in several coins. Thus cryptocurrencies that were supposed to level the playing field and fight the man have become a sad parody of themselves.

      --
      Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
    7. Re:Supply and demand by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      So then shady stake pools pop up that abscond with the entire pot after some period of complacency, just like many dozens of mining pools...

  6. *shrug* you're still wrong on the minor point... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Obviously you don't if you think the coin is actually "mined" by processing the blockchain transaction ledger. It was a small correction but you've proven you can't accept being wrong and instead double down twattishly.

    Learn how to accept correction in 2019, or be a cunt for life, I don't really care what you do or pretend to.

  7. Re: *shrug* you're still wrong on the minor point. by phantomfive · · Score: 1

    Correction means you say how it actually is. You haven't corrected anything.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  8. sobriety base camp by epine · · Score: 1

    First the alcoholic needs to sober up, and only then can he or she look for an actual job. Cutting outrageous over-consumption by 99% is a starting point, not a finish line.

    Person 1: You're useless and unreliable.

    Person 2: Oh yeah? Well, I used to be shitfaced all day long.

    Person 1: My bad. I misjudged you. Next drink's on me.

  9. Security by manu0601 · · Score: 1

    I believed that heavy crypto was a requirement to make transaction difficult to forge. Am I wrong? Or do they lower security? Or did they set the bar much too high in the first place so that they can slash 99% without consequence?

    1. Re:Security by Mathinker · · Score: 1

      The "heaviness" of a Proof-of-Work alt-coin like Bitcoin or Etherium (before this change) has nothing to do with the complexity of the cryptography and everything to do with there being enormous competition between miners because of the perceived value of the currency mined.

      In fact, one can characterize modern cryptography as the art of making a complex enough (to be secure) calculation as efficient as possible. And it is, typically, very, very efficient --- or it wouldn't be used.

      Furthermore, AFAIK, there is no proof that only Proof-of-Work can be secure or that it is inherently more secure than Proof-of-Stake or some other, yet to be discovered, algorithm. (This comment proposes that there could be yet another "solution" to the PoW escalation problem but it doesn't actually describe enough details so that I can try to analyze if it is at all viable.)

  10. Re:not absurd at all, very very tiny by iggymanz · · Score: 1

    So funny from someone who can't comprehend the meaning many orders of magnitude difference. No wonder you post AC, you're a dullard who slept through science and math classes. But don't worry, you have a fulfilling career ahead of you in the service industry. Make sure each urinal gets a big white mint, boy.

  11. Bullshit by reanjr · · Score: 2

    The average transaction fee for an ETH transaction is pennies or less. If that transaction is consuming as much electricity as an average household does in a day, then why aren't we powering houses with all this insanely cheap energy the Ethereum users seem so able to find?

  12. Re:That's some good PR, now let's see it work. by Joce640k · · Score: 1

    "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." - Even if they're off by 10% or 20% that's still fucking remarkable. Good for them.

    That's only the transaction cost though. The main cost is mining and that will be the same as before.

    --
    No sig today...
  13. Jevons paradox: this could INCREASE energy use by petes_PoV · · Score: 1
    The paradox was observed in the coal era. It suggests that when a resource gets to be used more efficiently, that increases demand for it and therefore increases consumption.

    So while Ethereum might produce more efficient code to reduce the per transaction waste, the overall effect of making each transaction so much cheaper could simply be to make transactions more attractive by a greater amount.

    --
    politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
  14. Re:phantomfive = the guy who can't admit he's wron by MikeDataLink · · Score: 1

    Obviously you can't admit you don't know how it works, but it doesn't mine the coin by verifying the transaction ledger. #You can admit this or not, it changes nothing. #Trump-like

    Dude. All you've done is name call and tell someone they are wrong (while they are actually correct) for 20 replies. Either educate us all with your greatness (you can't) or go away (you can and should).

    --
    Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
  15. Re: It's being subsidized by reanjr · · Score: 1

    Even if everyone on the Ethereum network were willing to accept 100% destruction of value, you are suggesting the newly created ethereum ($3M/day) is covering the electricity cost of transactions (600k/day) at the same rate as a household ($15/day, or a total of $9M/day).

    The math doesn't work. The analysis is bullshit.

  16. Re: It's being subsidized by reanjr · · Score: 1

    The actual electricity used per transaction is about 45Wh, or about what it costs to run an incandescent bulb for 45 minutes. Still high, but apparently not high enough to whip people into a frenzy with real numbers.