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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.

8 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 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.

    2. 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.

    3. 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.

  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 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.

    2. 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.