4 ms·

> but by that over 2 magnitudes? Why do you question the claim? The power consumption doesn't scale between the two by the quanta of miners, it scales differe

> but by that over 2 magnitudes? Why do you question the claim? The power consumption doesn't scale between the two by the quanta of miners, it scales differently because the algorithms are different and thus the power consumed is different. I have no idea how the algorithms differ nor how the difficulty differs among the two, so I don't have an intuition about how to guess whether or not they should scale relative to each other. I suspect that ethereum's market cap would be lower and probably have lower mining rewards therefore less capital invested in its global mining pool. I suspect that ethereum's algorithm requires more energy per block than bitcoin's, but I have a hard time guessing how much. Especially since it's a little less mature, maybe fewer ASIC miners so even less efficient in practice.

0xname 7y ago
There’s also the fact that Ethereum has an almost completely different architecture including block times which affect the frequency of mining, different reward structures, etc. As far as I know its not necessarily the difference between Bitcoin’s SHA-256 vs Ethereum’s Ethash as much as it is about the architecture itself.
- wyldfire 7y ago
  There's so many inputs that it's difficult to casually come up with an intuition-guided estimate. So it makes some sense to have faith in the empirically guided value. We hope that they took the time to validate their algorithm for extrapolating the energy consumption.
  - cottenio 7y ago
    The trinsicoin algorithm is really just a minimum bound based on the most efficient rigs known for a given algorithm and the cheapest industrial rates for electricity. The Litecoin Foundation actually helped out with some of the math and data resources.
CydeWeys 7y ago
The total power consumption of any given crypto currency scales according to the ongoing value of new block rewards per fixed unit of time. You can ignore the rest of the factors (like algo, block time) for the most part. Miners run if they can make money for a given cost of electricity, and don't if they can't.
- tromp 7y ago
  Indeed; see for example this screener showing daily issuance in dollars: https://messari.io/screener/play-around-074BC5B4 https://messari.io/screener/play-around-074BC5B4 from which we can infer that Bitcoin uses about 10x more electricity than Ethererum.

0xname 7y ago

There’s also the fact that Ethereum has an almost completely different architecture including block times which affect the frequency of mining, different reward structures, etc. As far as I know its not necessarily the difference between Bitcoin’s SHA-256 vs Ethereum’s Ethash as much as it is about the architecture itself.

wyldfire 7y ago
There's so many inputs that it's difficult to casually come up with an intuition-guided estimate. So it makes some sense to have faith in the empirically guided value. We hope that they took the time to validate their algorithm for extrapolating the energy consumption.
- cottenio 7y ago
  The trinsicoin algorithm is really just a minimum bound based on the most efficient rigs known for a given algorithm and the cheapest industrial rates for electricity. The Litecoin Foundation actually helped out with some of the math and data resources.

CydeWeys 7y ago

The total power consumption of any given crypto currency scales according to the ongoing value of new block rewards per fixed unit of time. You can ignore the rest of the factors (like algo, block time) for the most part. Miners run if they can make money for a given cost of electricity, and don't if they can't.

tromp 7y ago
Indeed; see for example this screener showing daily issuance in dollars: https://messari.io/screener/play-around-074BC5B4 https://messari.io/screener/play-around-074BC5B4 from which we can infer that Bitcoin uses about 10x more electricity than Ethererum.