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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.

15 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. 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 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.

    2. 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.

    3. 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.

    4. 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.

    5. 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.

    6. 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.

  2. 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."
  3. 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 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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?