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Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare
- Glench 6y agoWorth mentioning the cryptocurrency that Bram Cohen (inventor of bittorrent) is creating that is explicitly designed to be low-energy usage and more distributed: https://www.chia.net/ https://www.chia.net/ It uses "Proof of Space" (proof that you're allocating a certain amount of storage space) instead of Proof of Work or Proof of Stake. Pretty interesting and they're coming out of beta into their mainnet in the next few weeks. Their on-chain programming language is even Lisp-based!
- dwieringa 6y agoI mined BURST for a while, another PoS coin. It's been around for 7 years, works great, and solves the PoW power problem. It's got a lot of functionality built in for the nodes, like messaging and marketplace functions. And nobody cares. If I had to guess, I'd say the attractiveness of mining the PoW coins is that it's very expensive, but accordingly very rewarding. When the coins are cheap and easy to secure as a node, people seem to not be as interested, which means the coin doesn't get used. Chia, Sia, Filecoin all are trying to do similar, but have added in a "distributed Dropbox". There are some interesting challenges there, like quintuple redundancy and having your files stored across multiple nodes in shards for privacy. But in the end, they seem to suffer from the same issue as BURST: their feature set struggles to create popularity because they're not Bitcoin.
- londons_explore 6y agoAny of these coins could have linked themselves to bitcoin. Ie. They could have issued coins at the start to all bitcoin holders. If they did that, they'd get over the "we're not bitcoin" hurdle, assuming the tech was any good.
- londons_explore 6y agoThe best way is to have a way to "lock" bitcoin which can then be "imported" with a 1:1 exchange rate into your new altcoin. That way there is no proliferation of coins, and people will have trust knowing each of your altcoins is backed 1:1 with bitcoin.
- Nursie 6y agoIf that takes off, aren't we liable to see a rocketing demand for storage, doing to the storage market what PoW does for the graphics card market? And while it may be low energy to run, creating hard drives just to prove you have space seems a less than environmentally friendly activity. It looks just like another proof of waste
- londons_explore 6y agoThe main cost of compute is electricity. The main cost of hard drives is intellectual property (ie. Paying for the R&D, patents and licenses for all the tech inside). It isn't clear that "wasting" intellectual property is in any way bad for the wider economy. In fact, it probably just subsidies storage for the rest of us in the long term.
- Nursie 6y agoI was more thinking of the waste involved in manufacturing. If there's suddenly a much more direct profit motive to buying drives it's going to push more manufacturing, which is not the same as ongoing burning of energy for PoW, sure, but it's not going to be without side effects.
- aeternum 6y agoThis doesn't sound right, it's very doubtful that all storage tech has royalty (unit-based) license terms. Instead of electricity consumption the limiting factor will be raw materials to manufacture storage. Likely even worse for the environment given the energy and raw material cost to manufacture storage devices.
- monopoledance 6y agoIsn't that riddled with the same problems ultimately? You set up a system, which inherently ensures a certain resource will remain/become scarce (...for all of humanity), or fail. That's just super counter-productive for human prosperity...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- beambot 6y agoHow does this differ from Filecoin?
- pseudozach 6y agomain issue OP and other "I have a version of bitcoin that doesn't uses less energy/faster/cheaper etc." people have is that these existed before bitcoin and didn't work. They were shut down/coerced/coopted. Bitcoin ensures decentralization and finality via PoW. This new coin will take its place under bitcoin amongst 3000+ abandoned and newly released ones.
- xiphias2 6y agoSure, let's get back to a gold based system, it's so much more environmentally friendly :)
- lwansbrough 6y ago...it is. How much energy does it take to store gold?
- xiphias2 6y agoMuch more than to store Bitcoin....gold takes much more space than a digital wallet.
- Proven 6y agoComplete nonsense. Gold costs almost noting to store, there's some cost to secure it. Bitcoin on other other hand, consumes ever more power - the cost of maintaining the network (which is what it costs to store your BTC) is growing all the time. That's what the article is about.
- lwansbrough 6y agoAside from the fact that I’d be willing to bet that all the gold in the world occupies less space than all the Bitcoin mining equipment in the world, space is a terrible measure of energy consumption. So let me spell it out for you: Bitcoin is a system designed to maximize its energy use indefinitely for as long as it exists. The cost of holding any value of Bitcoin is equivalent to the energy consumption of the entire network for as long as it exists, because that Bitcoin’s existence is only guaranteed as long as the network remains online. By contrast, if I have a gold bar sitting in a safe in my house, there’s a fixed energy cost to that, and it’s virtually zero.
- ghgr 6y agoESG probably stands for Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental,_social_and_corporate_governance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental,_social_and_corp...
- ianai 6y agoOk yes that’s not obvious. Thank you!
- hahahahe 6y agoIt’s become meaningless. Think of it as crypto, AI/ML/DL, big data, etc of investment management industry.
- WanderPanda 6y ago* investment management industry x regulators
- idclip 6y agoI see the dyson cloud becoming Elon’s next big project to help maintain this network. Our energy production is too outdated and primitive. The same to our legislative bodies, human society is having an anally retentive crises when it comes to technology. The system’s chocked and cant function well.
- arethuza 6y agoThat would make an interesting answer to the Fermi paradox - nobody is travelling because everyone stays at home to perform PoW calculations in a dyson cloud. Which does rather remind me of Accelerando by Charlie Stross - maybe Economics 2.0 used by the vile offspring is a giant PoW scheme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando
- dave_sullivan 6y agoThere's a paper that talked about this quite a bit and is very interesting: https://www.accelerating.org/articles/transcensionhypothesis https://www.accelerating.org/articles/transcensionhypothesis Accelerando is great btw
- adflux 6y agoDyson sphere you mean? We are centuries away from achieving anything like that...
- haarts 6y agoA Dyson cloud is a similar mega structure but not a continuous surface. I think it is more commonly referred to as a Dyson swarm. Isaac Arthur [0] had an episode about it in which he mentioned such a structure to be quite feasible with modern day technology. [0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g
- Slikey 6y agoHe means a Dyson swarm and we are not centuries away from achieving this. The economical sense is on a different paper. Having ASIC miners in space connecting to something like Starlink is entirely possible even though not cost effective. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere#Dyson_swarm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere#Dyson_swarm
- ianai 6y agoWhat does ESG stand for? I searched the article and it’s not there. I’m sure it’s widely known in the literature this writes into, but key terms should still be introduced along with the acronym.
- jpkoning 6y agoEnvironmental, Social, and Corporate Governance.
- raverbashing 6y agoBitcoiners proposing that POW networks will bring about breakthroughs in energy production would be hilarious if they weren't destroying the planet while doing it Edit: the article examples are just infuriating. "Bitcoin is a battery" No, absolute-fck-lutely not!
- MadSudaca 6y agoCryptocurrencies are here to stay, environmentally unsound ones, probably not. Play your part and stop using/investing in cryptos that have a high carbon footprint.
- reedf1 6y agoI am so conflicted about the environmental impact of Proof-Of-Work. In many ways it feels like an arbitrary energy spend - but I think criticizing cryptocurrency for it seems a little disingenuous when we don't apply the same logic to other areas. What's the environmental impact of better refresh rates on monitors? What's the environmental impact of large scale cctv systems? What's the environmental impact of western-style mattresses?
- ForHackernews 6y agoNo other systems I know of are deliberately designed to continuously become less efficient. That's why Bitcoin/PoW is in a different category to me: It's a Red Queen's Race where all the miners are incentivized to keep wasting more and more energy (for no greater benefit) or else risk that somebody else can execute a 51% attack. Imagine if your email host needed to keep burning more and more energy, not to send any more emails, but because if they ever backed off, somebody else could steal your email address from you.
- djbebs 6y agoExcept they are not incentivised to expend more and more energy. The amount of energy expended is a direct correlation to how important bitcoin is. You wouldn't criticize a government for spending millions keeping ita gold reserves safe, even though it can store them just as easily in a warehouse as it can in fort knox
- ForHackernews 6y agoThis is a completely bogus analogy. Even if I accepted that bitcoin was analogous to gold (hint: it's not), the government secures Ft. Knox to whatever level of security it feels appropriate, and then it's done/maintained at that level. It's not like Russia adds one more guard to their gold vault, the US has to keep pace or else if Russia has 51% more guards outside their vault, then by magic they can suddenly steal/double-spend gold. Do bitcoin folks really not understand this, or are they all just pretending to be blind because they hope it will make them rich?
- cableshaft 6y agoSo since bitcoin is up right now, we're just going to see nonstop attacks on the fact that it's not climate friendly with its energy usage? Feels like this is the sixth article I've seen on Hacker News in the last month. From a quick skim this article seems like it might have some good data, but it also has a bunch of loaded language in it that turns me off from wanting to read the article. "Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare" "This paper looks at the energy consumption of seven proof-of-work-based anarchic (public) blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum." (You know how anarchy is bad right, well we're going to say these are like anarchy, so they're bad too.) "Many Bitcoin promoters conjure a future world...[where Bitcoin is king and leads to renewable energy]" (they're like spellcasters, this future doesn't really exist, they're trying to pretend they will create it out of nothing but they never will!) "Putting aside the continual greenwashing that many advocates are guilty of" (You know how whitewashing is bad? Well so is greenwashing! I'm saying these people do that and that means they're bad!) "The container ship fetish is a slight-of-hand[sic] trick..." (These guys have fetishes and fetishes are bad, also they're using slight-of-hand and tricking you, and tricking people is bad!) Also the writer misspelled 'sleight'. If they wanted to change minds the writer should have used more neutral language in their sentences. You can be persuasive without resorting to this. I'll sit down and read it a bit later, but not feeling like trudging through all this loaded language.
- ForHackernews 6y agoNone of the neutral language moves the needle. People have been pointing out for years that using more energy than all of Denmark to handle fewer transactions than a mid-sized Walmart is not a recipe for success. There are too many bagholders, excuse me, "investors" who are financially motivated to keep pushing this stuff.
- Rallerbabs 6y agoBitcoin is at all time high, meaning just about everybody who ever bought bitcoin is currently in profit. There are very few bagholders.
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- zyphr 6y agoThe locked up energy used for mining was never available to populated area's in the first place, it is exces energy. It's a bit like if you compare taking a shower in the middle of the desert with standing under a water fall and telling someone not to waste water while standing there because you consume as much water as 10000 people.
- ForHackernews 6y agoSays who? Bitcoin advocates always claim this, but never provide any compelling sources to back up this assertion. Can you not smelt aluminium in remote areas? Can you not perform hydrolysis to generate hydrogen? There are plenty of other good uses for electricity besides bitcoin or powering a city directly.
- mightybyte 6y agoIf you smelt aluminium in a remote area you then have to move it to an area where it can be useful. Moving it consumes a lot of energy. If you mine a bitcoin near a power plant with excess capacity, anyone anywhere in the world with an internet connection can leverage that work for value transmission. This literally allows a computer in China to replace an armored car in Denver, Colorado. > There are plenty of other good uses for electricity besides bitcoin or powering a city directly. The argument "uses lots of energy = bad" is a fallacy. You have to take into account what the alternatives are. You know what uses a lot of energy? Public transit systems. But nobody is arguing that public transit systems are bad because the alternatives are a lot worse.
- ForHackernews 6y agoBut if you smelt aluminium, you have valuable aluminium. It's disingenuous to pretend (without any sourcing) that bitcoin is only mined using electricity that would otherwise have been wasted. If this were really true, then bitcoin miners should all be getting paid to act as load banks[0] for their local electrical grid and soak up that excess power. Since they are instead paying for electricity, they are using valuable electricity, not spare/waste power. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_bank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_bank
- markkat 6y agoI expect that once Ethereum completes the switch to PoS, this issue is going to loom large for Bitcoin.
- hahahahe 6y agoThis is why I think a big land grab will happen for ETH. And even though I think bitcoin is grossly overvalued, ETH could accelerate and possibly surpass bitcoin in terms of paid-in capital. PoS, at least in theory, creates future cash flow. Not a fan of crypto but Vitalik is one of very few people in the crypto space with genuine good intentions and intellectual curiosity.
- pseudozach 6y agohe also has a %70 premine of this coin with his buddies. Eth also have a dynamic issuance schedule exactly like USD, EUR or any other fiat. Except instead of a Central Bank, a few devs decide it.
- hahahahe 6y agoWell aware. Again, not a fan of crypto at this point but just on a relative basis it seems ETH is a logical choice to come out ahead.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- c01n 6y ago> ...once Ethereum completes the switch to PoS This is starting to sound like a chorus.
- yvdriess 6y agoPleasant surprise: Chia uses a Lisp dialect as on-chain command language https://github.com/Chia-Network/wallets/blob/master/puzzles/make_puzzle_m_of_n_direct.clvm https://github.com/Chia-Network/wallets/blob/master/puzzles/...
- kyrieeschaton 6y agoWhat's the energy cost of a financial sector that takes a ~3% cut of all retail transactions, puts up physical bank branches to manage money, empowers a federal reserve to manage the value of currency with more or less competency... Comparing BTC energy costs to some mythical world where we just burn free lunches for heat is not honest.
- MrMan 6y agoBitcoin is a tiny part of that world and simply becomes part of it.
- waynesonfire 6y agoThere is nothing about BTC that deprecates the issues you present.
- kyrieeschaton 6y agoBTC trivially avoids, eg, chargebacks. It is effectively the only money transmission mechanism that verifiably does do.
- dsukhin 6y agoIt's worth comparing Bitcoin's proof of work to other schemes of maintaining currency value to understand this in a relative sense. The Military Industrial Complex which arguably is the mechanism by which the dollar maintains its position as the global reserve currency puts out 152MtCO2/yr [1]. Without making any judgement on if this ratio is reasonable: this is 3-5x more than BTC POW but arguably also contains other negative externalities like loss of life, etc. [1] https://earther.gizmodo.com/groundbreaking-report-gives-us-a-glimpse-of-the-u-s-mi-1835458508 https://earther.gizmodo.com/groundbreaking-report-gives-us-a...
- snakeboy 6y agoI don't really know much about bitcoin and how mining scales with the number of trades, but there are only a few million Bitcoin users, meanwhile there are billions of USD holders/users each of whom have (I'd guess) significantly more average daily transactions. That's something like 5 orders of magnitude more activity with USD vs BTC. So for something that is used upwards of 100,000x more and only takes 5x more energy, that'd be a win for USD, no? This of course is all disregarding my strong skepticism that the excesses of the US Military is a reasonable proxy for the strength of the US dollar.
- qeternity 6y agoWhat in the eff... That's quite an unbelievable leap. The USD infrastructure and it's energy needs is in no way dependent on reserve status. That's just grasping at straws. The same plumbing handles a plethora of other, smaller currencies with many orders of magnitude better efficiency than BTC does (yeah yeah Lightning, off chain, blah blah).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rspeele 6y agoI can't wait till the whole world is using Bitcoin and we no longer have to spend money on militaries, banks, and investment companies. At least I assume Bitcoin obviates all of those things since I keep seeing them brought up in comparison to Bitcoin's energy usage.
- ycombinatorrio 6y agoBitcoin critics continue to assert that mining is wasteful and disproportionately damaging to the environment. Contrary to consensus thinking, we believe the impact of bitcoin mining is a net positive for the environment. Here's why: First, proof-of-work mining is critical to Bitcoin. In the Bitcoin network, trustworthiness is protected by computation, and mining is what gives Bitcoin its ability to coordinate trust and facilitate the transfer of value without relying on a centralized authority. The costliness to produce bitcoin is fundamental to its value. Unlike the US dollar, Bitcoin cannot be printed with the stroke of a keyboard. Instead, it converts the output from cheap stranded energy sources into something with monetary value. Even so, Bitcoin’s energy consumption is trivial compared to legacy financial systems. As measured by electricity costs alone, Bitcoin is much more efficient than traditional banking and gold mining on a global scale. Traditional banking consumes 2.34 B GJ/yr and gold mining 500 M GJ/yr, while Bitcoin consumes 184 M GJ/yr. Additionally, Bitcoin mining’s estimated $ cost / GJ expended is 40x more efficient than that of traditional banking and 10x more efficient than that of gold mining. Another common mistake energy detractors make is to naively extrapolate Bitcoin’s energy consumption to the equivalent CO2 emissions. What matters is the type of energy source being used to generate electricity. In reality, renewables account for the largest percentage of bitcoin’s energy mix. In the search for the cheapest form of electricity, miners flock to regions offering a glut of renewable electricity, unlocking stranded energy assets.In some instances, Bitcoin mining is even helping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by consuming methane that would have been leaked into the atmosphere via flaring."That energy would have been wasted, as is evidenced by the existence of flare stacks. That gas is flared because it can't be brought to market. Bitcoin miners are incentivized to show up and consume that wasted energy."Coins only need to be issued once. And it’s better for the planet that they be issued when the coin price was low, and the electricity expended to extract them was commensurately low.In summary, Bitcoin does not waste energy. It is clear that because Bitcoin’s footprint is so easy to quantify, it is singled out for special treatment.
- mariusor 6y ago"But they did it first" stops being an excuse once you move on from third grade. Even if the costs of bitcoin generation and transactions are better than mining gold, it's still a poor excuse to prefer "getting rich quick" to being considerate to the future generations.
- AnthonyMouse 6y agoCryptocurrency is still something that legacy financial systems could easily out-compete given an appropriate regulatory environment. There are things Bitcoin is better at than e.g. credit cards. If you're a trusted merchant with shady customers, once the transaction posts you don't have to worry about scammers fraudulently disputing the charge or your bank cutting you off because that happened too often. You can get Bitcoin under a pseudonym and use it to buy something (e.g. banned or controversial books, VPN for dissidents) that you don't want tied to your meatspace identity. Things like that. None of this would be impossible to do with ordinary financial systems except that existing regulations prohibit it. But if anybody can do it with Bitcoin regardless then there is no point in that and you might as well allow it in general. At which point, why are we burning all this energy on Bitcoin?
- kace91 6y agoPresumably, forcing illegal actions to happen through bitcoin adds friction to the process. But more importantly, as far as I know bitcoin is not designed to guarantee anonymity in money transfers, and the fact that every transaction is set in stone publicly in the blockchain makes it relatively easily traceable. Am I wrong in that area?
- kevingadd 6y agoWhile it's not trivial, it's been shown that you can de-anonymize bitcoin transactions. In some cases it's very easy. So in practice you can't rely on your transactions being anonymous even if in practice some of them may end up that way. And of course even if transactions themselves were fully anonymous, many people end up needing to rely on exchanges, and the idea of those being truly anonymous is borderline absurd.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago> Presumably, forcing illegal actions to happen through bitcoin adds friction to it. Adding friction to non-illegal actions is harm, not benefit. Adding friction to illegal actions is the opposite of what happens, because it's enabling something that wasn't previously possible. Also, criminals can survive higher friction than dissidents and vulnerable populations because the illegality creates a moat that raises margins. It's why drug cartels make billions of dollars and can finance submarines and stuff but marginal changes that nobody thinks through the implications of get dissidents killed. > But more importantly, as far as I know bitcoin is not designed to guarantee anonymity in money transfers, and the fact that every transaction is set in stone publicly in the blockchain makes it relatively easily traceable. Am I wrong in that area? Every transaction is public but it's only the transaction and there is no requirement to reuse the same wallet for multiple transactions. You go to some cryptocurrency hangout, pay some stranger a hundred bucks in cash and they transfer a hundred bucks in Bitcoin to your wallet. You go pay for a VPN with it. Then everybody can see that A transferred money to B and B transferred money to C, but nobody knows that you're B and those are the only transactions for that wallet. Also, there are cryptocurrencies where this isn't the case and you don't even get that.
- ravenstine 6y agoHow does this compare to the environmental impact of the millions of people constantly surfing sites like Reddit all day? I always hear about how bad Bitcoin is in terms of energy consumption, but nobody seems to perform similar analysis on actually frivolous activities we all accept in our society.
- seibelj 6y agoNo - the only things that matter for electricity are cryptocurrency. All other frivolous uses of electricity cannot be criticized.
- wruza 6y agoBut how does reddit browsing scale? We may choose all-electric activities, but we still have only 24h/day. As far as I understand it, PoW mining and its energy consumption can grow arbitrarily, the only limit is a mining economy that grows with a coin value. And it grows fast. How much energy will it take if BTC or ETH hits e.g. $1M in few years?
- Sholmesy 6y agoThere was a comment in a sister thread positing that Cryptocurrencies currently use 1/3rd of the entire data center energy use on the planet. I haven't looked into this, and I don't endorse this data or the comment, but it's likely relevant to your question: Bitcoin uses about 1/3 the energy of all datacenters in the world put together. Datacenters use about 205 TWh/year. https://www.networkworld.com/article/3531316/data-center-pow https://www.networkworld.com/article/3531316/data-center-pow... Bitcoin uses about 75 TWh/year. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption And that's with everyone on the planet using normal money every day and just about no one using Bitcoin.
- RhodoGSA 6y agoUsually asset classes that don't have any negative externalities priced into their value are the best performing assets.
- whoisninja 6y agodrink wall st. ESG kool-aid if you want, i have seen diamond merchants in ESG ETF componens. go figure. your electric cars as well combustin engine cars use lot of energy worse than Bitcoin. oh cars get you from point a to point b. guess what, Bitcoin gets your value from point a to point b more efficiently than anything else out there yet and it maintains so keeping it as the hardest money known to humans gold mining, banking services use lot of energy you playing xbox or publishing dumb articles on an ad-tech trojan horse also takes energy learn and adapt , else get extinct
- whoisninja 6y agoread this if you want to help yourself: https://www.coindesk.com/the-last-word-on-bitcoins-energy-consumption https://www.coindesk.com/the-last-word-on-bitcoins-energy-co...
- pseudozach 6y agoSo many gems in this one that shows the bias of the author: "Simply: the Bitcoin blockchain only transfers and secures bitcoins. It does not move actual money like Fedwire does." This is factually incorrect when you actually own both of these "monies". But it wouldn't bother you if you only own the devaluing one.
- louloulou 6y agoIf the problem is carbon emissions, we should be taxing carbon emissions.
- pochamago 6y agoI honestly just can't buy into high energy usage as a criticism. I think we should be focusing our efforts on massively expanding our power generation, not cutting back usage.
- woeh 6y agoAs a counterargument, proof of work takes all the energy it can get: because bitcoin automatically makes the work to proof more difficult. This means when there is more available energy it's lucrative for miners to put more energy in the system. However, no more bitcoins are outputted. The only extra output is heat from used hardware. In some other related topic on HN, someone compared it to a car, where more energy would not just mean more miles driven, but an equally longer road.
- pochamago 6y agoYou're probably right that the incentives are misaligned. I suppose I'm just reacting against what I feel is an anti-progressive assumption, which is that reducing our carbon footprint to desirable levels will require a massive reduction in our energy footprint.
- woeh 6y agoI understand your sentiment, and I agree that the future probably is one where we use and generate a lot more energy then we do now. But I do hope that in that future we also use that energy a little bit smarter, and proof of work's incentives are indeed aligned poorly from this perspective. Disclaimer: I am conflicted about the subject, because I think there is merit in crypto, and also hold some myself.
- mrfinn 6y agoThe solution to this problem is already invented, and working: Nano cryptocurrency. BTW forget about paying ANY fees. Nano vs Bitcoin energy consumption: https://www.reddit.com/r/nanocurrency/comments/lhveo4/bitcoin_vs_nano_power_usage_visualized/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nanocurrency/comments/lhveo4/bitcoi...
- rmtech 6y agoI think the mistake here is that the author doesn't understand the potential of cryptocurrency so sees electricity use for crypto as a pure cost. You can see this because of comparisons to centralized services. On coal power: It's bad to use coal to mine Bitcoin, but it's bad to use coal to provide power for any activity. Coal power should be banned outright.
- rmtech 6y agoAnother issue is that proof-of-work may simply be inferior to other consensus mechanisms because of hardware centralization. I think the cryptocurrency world needs to solve this problem at its own pace though. Ethereum is already rapidly heading to proof-of-stake, precisely because it's seen as better on its own merits without considering energy costs.