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Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

360 points by GBiT 5y ago

dgjnvhhb 5y ago
This is dumb. The transaction confirmations are not equivalent between chains.
danielvf 5y ago
Cool chart! Interesting to see how much of an outlier Bitcoin is. The middle tier currencies in this list (USDC, USDT, etc) are built on Ethereum, so once Ethereum finishes its switch over to proof-of-stake, both they and Ethereum will drop down to almost nothing in terms of power used per transaction.
- Judgmentality 5y ago
  > so once Ethereum finishes its switch over to proof-of-stake Isn't there a lot of uncertainty as to how well proof-of-stake will work?
  - danielvf 5y ago
    ETH2 (proof-of-stake) already has 16 billion dollars of ETH locked into it, and has been running for months. The proof-of-stake switchover seems to be on a good track and should work form technical standpoint.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - dvh 5y ago
      Python 3 is better than python 2 and people will soon switch.
      - chrisco255 5y ago
        Programming language upgrades are not the same as blockchain upgrades. Blockchains work on consensus, so you need a majority of nodes to agree with your changes to the chain or you risk a hard fork. At any rate, ETH2 proof-of-stake is already live, the last remaining piece is The Merge, which merges the existing proof-of-work chain into the already live and operational ETH2 proof-of-stake validator nodes.
      - viraptor 5y ago
        People have largely switched already. Py2 is gone from default installs these days. So yes, even if it takes a while, people often do switch to better solutions.
        Judgmentality 5y ago
        https://dev.to/hugovk/python-version-share-over-time-6-1jb8 https://dev.to/hugovk/python-version-share-over-time-6-1jb8 It seems like Python 2 is still pretty prevalent, with over 40% of new downloads taking place as of last year. And people forget Python 3 was originally introduced in 2008. So the transition is taking decades, not years. The last place I worked was still using Python 2 as of last year, and they were a startup without all the bureaucracy of a big company. They also had plenty of money and engineers. Python 2 is still the default for everybody I know.
        jreese 5y ago
        PyPI stats for "six", the second most popular package, that's used for 2/3 compatibility in tons of libraries, shows 80% of its millions of daily downloads are for Python 3. [1] The proportion for "requests", a building block for a ton of long-standing packages, is even higher. Anyone using Python 2 at this point are either supporting legacy software, getting their runtimes/packages from distros rather than PyPI, or otherwise completely checked out of the modern Python ecosystem. 1: https://pypistats.org/packages/six https://pypistats.org/packages/six
        imtringued 5y ago
        There are people who are not using segwit on Bitcoin even though it means they spend twice as much on Bitcoin transaction fees. https://transactionfee.info/charts/payments-spending-segwit/ https://transactionfee.info/charts/payments-spending-segwit/
        takeda 5y ago
        That statistics end at most interesting time: December 2019. Starting with January, python 2 was officially EOL, and many packages dropped support for it. Right now developing for Python 2 is kind of tough, because most dependencies won't work.
      - dcolkitt 5y ago
        Well if Python 2 had a logic bomb that literally makes it unusable after the end-of-life date, that would be true.
        takeda 5y ago
        It kind of has. I mean if you don't touch your code it will continue to work but if you have to maintain it, you quickly realize that a lot of your dependencies will refuse to work. It might be easy to fix them to work again, but with time it will be more and more work to do.
        Taek 5y ago
        Ethereum's original logic bomb was set to trigger in 2017. Then later it was updated to trigger in 2017. And then later it was updated to trigger in 2018, and then 2020, and currently I believe it's set to trigger in 2022. But there's no political reason to believe that they won't just push it out again. It's just a ceremony at this point.
  - chrisco255 5y ago
    No, proof-of-stake has been live since December. The final remaining migration is The Merge, which is estimated to occur towards the end of this year, March 2022 at the absolute latest. For more info, see: https://ethmerge.com/ https://ethmerge.com/
  - wyager 5y ago
    It's the kind of thing where if it fails, it's going to fail explosively and unexpectedly. Proof-of-stake is vulnerable to various miner collusion attacks that Bitcoin is not vulnerable to. The gist of it is that casting multiple conflicting votes (sometimes way after you cast your original vote) doesn't require any additional resources in a proof-of-stake system, whereas casting additional votes in a proof-of-work system is very expensive.
    - SubiculumCode 5y ago
      I may be wrong, but collusion is hard to achieve via provably random selection procedures for validators of transactions, etc.
      - wyager 5y ago
        Network participants are free to ignore the results of provably random selection procedures and “re-roll”. In general there is no known way to impose real cost on protocol violations like this. This is the genius of PoW; it uniquely associates real-world expenditures with protocol actions. It’s probably impossible to replicate this in a more efficient, but still secure and reliable, way.
        dane-pgp 5y ago
        I'm not sure if this is how it works, but it should be possible to avoid the "re-roll" problem: Each node picks a random value, and publishes the hash of it to the blockchain, then, when the network has reached finality on what all the hashes are, the nodes publish the random values themselves, and the network takes the XOR of all of them.
        wyager 5y ago
        Nodes can simply choose not to publish their value if the result is unfavorable to them, and this tanks the whole procedure. This isn’t a problem unique to your scheme; they all suffer from things like this.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  Am I reading something wrong? To me, it looks like it is saying that Bitcoin uses 830kWh and Ethereum uses almost 38 times that. Considering >1% of the world's energy is used by Bitcoin - it seems virtually impossible for Ethereum to use 38x more energy...
  - terhechte 5y ago
    Bitcoin SV != Bitcoin. SV is a Bitcoin fork. Bitcoin is at the bottom of the list
  - chrisco255 5y ago
    Bitcoin SV is a barely used esoteric fork of Bitcoin with a $5.5B market cap. It's a cash grab from a minority fork of BTC or BCH miners.
    - 988747 5y ago
      It is fun to see something with $5.5B market cap being called "esoteric" and "barely used". I wish I had a side project with similar market cap :P
      - wmf 5y ago
        This is a sign that market caps are irrelevant, the whole crypto scene is crazy, or both.
        duskwuff 5y ago
        Market caps get extra weird for cryptocurrencies which are created as forks of an existing chain, because everyone who held the original coin at the time of the fork technically holds an equal number of the forked coins, even if the owners of those coins have never interacted with the fork.
        X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
        Not to mention exchanges that didn't participate in the fork
- GBiT 5y ago
  We will see how proof of stake will work, and in FAQ is a paper about it. POS have one big problem, that you only have to buy coins once and stake them and you will get richer every day by doing nothing without any additional investment. Basically it will make rich richer and more centralized. We will see how it will works in future.
  - Cantinflas 5y ago
    This is not true, you have to run a validator to get rewarded. Rewards will be much less than miners get now, and the whole "rich get richer" is literally how investment works in basically anything, even Bitcoin mining
    - GBiT 5y ago
      Yes, running a validator will cost some money. I will explain how I think. If the rich want to get richer he have to make good investment decisions and some work. In POS you don't have to do anything at all, just buy and hold. So in POS, you don't need to innovate your business model. In POW, you always have to innovate to be a leader. Bitcoin ASIC innovation in last years shows how strong competition is. And competition makes innovation. In POS you just keep coins and stake them. Thats it
      - shawnz 5y ago
        This is often claimed to be an advantage of PoS: you can't get an extra increase in rate of profits by being richer (beyond the linear increase you'd expect). With PoW on the other hand, the richest have the best access to the most innovative technology and so you get superlinear profits the richer you are.
        GBiT 5y ago
        Real world case: Intel had the most advanced chip and more money, until one day AMD got better. In POS this scenario is impossible. First will always be first.
        5y ago
- chrisco255 5y ago
  Are they double-counting the Ethereum tokens like Chainlink, Uniswap, etc? Ethereum hashing inherently includes ERC20 transactions. ERC20s are just state changes on the Ethereum blockchain and don't affect hashing use or non-use.
  - 22c 5y ago
    It's not really clear how any of this is calculated, considering the vast majority of USDC and USDT transactions occur off chain.
- bhaak 5y ago
  USDT does not run solely on Ethereum. Currently it's about 50:50 Ethereum and Tron (of all things!). https://wallet.tether.to/transparency https://wallet.tether.to/transparency USDC is likewise a multichain stablecoin (Ethereum, Stellar, Algorand, and Solana) but I couldn't find information on how much is on each chain.
  - 22c 5y ago
    I'm also assuming that these transparency reports don't count when an asset has been bridged to another network. A big chunk of USDC and USDT floating around on smaller PoS networks have been bridged from ERC20, so would appear to be idling on ERC20 but could actually be exchanging hands on a completely separate network.
huntertwo 5y ago
This is a solid idea, but needs more currencies like Cardano and Polkadot that claim energy efficiency as their strength
- ujuj 5y ago
  Wouldn't it be harder to evaluate in PoS-based cryptocurrencies?
  - baby 5y ago
    Not really, you can evaluate PoS-based by the bandwidth and the message complexity of their consensus mechanism and the space required to sync and run a node.
  - 0134340 5y ago
    PoS still encourages using more powerful hardware and faster internet because it equates to more transactions. That said, I've seen people use Pi's as stakers. But you can still test the current draw per transaction much the same as with PoW currencies.
    - baby 5y ago
      More power doesn’t equate to more throughput in PoS schemes, unless everyone is increasing their power and communication isn’t your bottleneck, but even then there’s a quick ceiling you’ll reach.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- everfree 5y ago
  PoS-based cryptocurrencies use thousands of times less electricity than PoW-based ones, so all PoW cryptos would be above all PoS cryptos in the ranking. It wouldn't be an interesting chart.
  - wmf 5y ago
dheera 5y ago
Mildly off topic question: If one had Bitcoin in an exchange instead of an offline wallet, does that mean that when forks occur, the exchange does not give you coins in the fork? Also, what about PoS coins? Aren't those vastly more efficient than any of these?
- danielvf 5y ago
  That depends on the exchange. Some of them do, if the fork eventually becomes very popular. It's not anything to count on though.
- Sekhmet 5y ago
  > If one had Bitcoin in an exchange instead of an offline wallet, does that mean that when forks occur, the exchange does not give you coins in the fork? In most cases you do get new coins post-fork. Exchange will announce whether they support the fork or not before it happens, so you can react.
gruez 5y ago
There's a [dead] comment that brings up a good point, so I'll repost it here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27176459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27176459 > This is dumb. The transaction confirmations are not equivalent between chains. Specifically, if there were two identical cryptocurrencies that only differ by difficulty (eg. coin A with difficulty of 1 and coin B with difficulty of 10), the coin with the lower difficulty might be 10x more efficient, but also 10x easier to rewrite. For proof of stake coins, it's essentially "free" if you can get enough people on board (since you won't be penalized, only the losing chain would be).
mistrial9 5y ago
if a huge hydro power generator in a remote location on a far away continent wastes local energy, does my city power bill go up? because of BTC ? tell me more
- glutamate 5y ago
  FTFY: If a huge coal power station emits tons of CO2 to mine funnycoins for cryptobros, will the sea levels still rise?
- zdragnar 5y ago
  Might be. If the hydro generator isn't supplying enough energy to the local area because of BTC, then presumably a higher load falls on petro energy to fill in the gap in supply. That influences the global market a tiny amount. Your power bill likewise is affected, presuming your provider has any petro in its supply mix, which it likely does (even if only as a backup). The impact is tiny to nonexistent at a scale of 1, but for numbers greater than 1 the impact likewise increases.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    Or more succinctly: Electricity tends to be fungible and move over geographically large networks, so most of it is probably interchangeable even over large areas/distance.
    - zdragnar 5y ago
      I think this is less true for purely renewable grids separated by large continents. The amount of concrete and steel needed to move solar from the Sahara to Finland makes the energy very much not green anymore. Petro energy- natural gas, diesel plus coal- don't really concern themselves with CO2 and can use existing transportation to get to remote areas, so the energy produced is very much more fungible on a global scale.
    - gruez 5y ago
      It really isn't. Quebec has rock bottom prices for electricity but 250mi away in boston the electricity cost several times more. https://www.hydroquebec.com/data/documents-donnees/pdf/comparison-electricity-prices.pdf https://www.hydroquebec.com/data/documents-donnees/pdf/compa...
JohnGB 5y ago
You've left out PeerCoin (PPC) the original PoW cryptocurrency which has been in constant operation and development since 2013. It is by far the most energy efficient, as that was one of the main goals in the design of PeerCoin.
- everfree 5y ago
  Original PoS cryptocurrency, I think you mean.
crazypython 5y ago
Note that Bitcoin SV is completely controlled by miners, a 51% attack can change the rules. In the original Bitcoin, a 51% attack can only reverse recent transactions, not change the rules or compromise stored funds.
- pmorici 5y ago
  Bitcoin SV was the result of a sociopath who lied about being Satoshi Nakamoto and supporters of Bitcoin core encouraged it because it fit their political goals.
- dudewhat1 5y ago
  Yea if you want to spend millions if not billions to 51% attack it and the public nature of bitcoin is such that everyone would know who attacked it leaving them legally liable then be my guest. There is more incentive not to attack it than there is to attack it. when will people realize this.
  - donio 5y ago
    What sort of legal liability though? What law, regulation or contract would they be violating?
wmf 5y ago
Txs / MWh is not a valid metric for most cryptocurrencies since power consumption is proportional to price, not transactions. Also, BSV and BCH are totally insecure so it's not really fair to compare them to secure cryptocurrencies.
- qeternity 5y ago
  Of course it’s a valid metric. The whole point of this is that most crypto is not used to transact, but to speculate, and so a high price and therefore high carbon footprint with a low transaction throughput is often the whole point of these analyses.
  - shawnz 5y ago
    Transactions aren't the only thing which makes cryptocurrencies useful, and even then, cryptocurrency transactions aren't directly comparable to each other or to transactions in traditional financial systems since they can have a much different risk profile. Furthermore it's not obvious that increased transaction rates are necessary yet in most cryptocurrencies and so it might not make sense to optimize for that yet. There is no point encouraging frivolous data to be added to the blockchain permanently if the demand to make useful transactions isn't there yet.
- pmorici 5y ago
  It's proportional to the value a miner is awarded (ie: block reward + transaction fess) for mining a block not the price of the coin. Saying it is the price of the coin is like saying Berkshire Hathaway is worth more than Apple because their share price is a lot higher.
  - lvs 5y ago
    No, I think you misunderstand. The rewards are predictable, and fees are generally a tiny fraction of the total reward (a few percent or less). The exchange rate vs the price of electricity is what determines whether it's profitable to consume electricity to hash for a PoW chain. There are some efficiency hacks like merged mining that improve the situation a bit, but essentially the person you're downvoting is totally correct.
dehrmann 5y ago
This actually points out why Tesla not accepting bitcoin for environmental reasons is silly: 134.0 kg of CO2 per transaction about as much CO2 as a tank of gas. This is ridiculously inefficient, but it's a car; the energy inputs are already high. The real issue is the interest Musk created when Tesla bought bitcoin a few months ago and how he grew a conscious suspiciously fast.
- nr2x 5y ago
  Wondering how overstretched his financials are if he’s turning to btc pump and dump schemes.
evanrich 5y ago
Would eth2.0 have a significantly higher txs/mwh? I have read 99% reduction in some places. Seems well positioned to top this list.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  Yes should be about 1% of what it is now. This is is why I am investing hard in Ethereum right now while I still can. I truly do not see Bitcoin sustaining much longer as the top coin.
- rawtxapp 5y ago
  Yes, due to the 2nd layer solutions it's going to bring along. You have the same idea in Bitcoin called lightning network (with growing adoption: 1ml.com).
- baby 5y ago
  They’re moving to proof of stake so yes, soon
toomim 5y ago
As a Bitcoin miner (https://toom.im https://toom.im), while I appreciate the work put into it, this particular metric of "transactions per kW" might not work the way you expect. The main point that you should understand is that a PoW blockchain's energy usage is not proportional to its transactions. I'll say that a different way: the transactions themselves do not use any energy in mining. I'll say this in a third way: it takes exactly the same amount of energy to mine an empty block as it does a 1GB block of transactions, as it does a 1,000,000,000 PB block. In reality, transactions are all hashed together in a mining pool into a single numeric hash before miners ever see them. It doesn't matter how many transactions are included in the hash. The hashpower just has to find a magic number matching that hash. On the other hand, the #1 factor that increases a blockchain's energy usage is its price per coin. The price of a coin is how much that coin is worth to be mined, which is the incentive for miners to dump energy into mining it. In steady state, miners will dump energy into mining a coin until the cost of energy = the value of the coins coming out. This is why you can see Bitcoin SV at the top of the list -- it's worth the least of the Bitcoins. And it's also misleading to compute the second factor -- transactions per second -- by counting the actual transactions on the blockchain, rather than looking at the transaction capacity. Because blockchains only cost something per transaction once they reach capacity. This is misleading with Bitcoin SV, for instance, because that coin artificially creates bogus transactions on its blockchain in order to make it look popular and demonstrate the vision of large blockchains. Bitcoin Cash, on the other hand, can handle a thousands of transactions per second (on testnet) but doesn't clog its live blockchain with them. So, in sum, if you send a transaction on Bitcoin Cash, it will cost 0 kW of electricity, even though it says 31.3 Txs/MWh (which equates to 31.9kW/Tx) in this chart. This is because transactions do not cost anything in electricity. Electricity only goes to preventing double-spends. A better metric would be "energy use per double-spend that was prevented."
- toomim 5y ago
  And to be complete, there are other ways that PoW blockchains can compete on energy efficiency: 1) Inflation rate 2) PoW function 3) Transaction cost after blocksize limit reached The inflation rate determines the incentive given to miners. With less incentive, the energy use will go down. This comes at the cost of increasing the ease of a double-spend, but there is already far more than enough difficulty to double-spend at the current mining rates. The PoW function determines the capital cost required to buy the miners themselves. If you increase the capital costs (e.g. with a memory-hard PoW function, or requiring less-efficient GPUs instead of more-efficient ASICs) then miners will be able to spend less of their costs on energy. This is one way in which Eth does well by the above metric, and is a valid way to reduce energy usage in PoW. Of course, transitioning to proof-of-stake (as eth is doing) will eliminate the energy problem entirely. Finally, some blockchains (e.g. BTC, ETH) have reached their capacity of transactions per second, and then users can add a fee to each transaction to incentivize mining pools to include them in a block. These fees do add incentive for miners to dump energy into their blocks. However, they are a much smaller portion of the incentive than you would expect.
asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
A fascinating thought experiment would be to have a further breakdown by "non-speculative" transaction. It's difficult/impossible to compute whether a transaction's purpose is speculation, but given that that's most of what these coins are currently used for, it would surprise me if less than half of these transactions are for the purpose of price speculation. This is going to make these coins compare substantially less favorably compared to e.g. credit cards or cash money.
- duskwuff 5y ago
  For the vast majority of cryptocurrencies, especially once you get beyond the "big two" of Bitcoin and Ethereum, I suspect that virtually all (>99%) transactions are speculative in nature.
bogota 5y ago
Interesting but I’m not sure of the point. PoW by design is not energy efficient. The incentive is just not in the correct place. Interesting but if the goal is to show more energy efficient coins we need to be looking at different tech such as PoS. Although this might have just been a fun project someone put together in which case nice job.
- mmmeff 5y ago
  Truth, I was hoping to see how the greener DAG networks like IOTA and Cardano stack up here.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  Efficiency doesn't even make sense since mining can take up close to no, or infinite power. The amount of energy a PoW coin uses entirely depends on the cost of electricity, hardware, and profitability. When a coin spikes in value, the profitability goes up so more miners join in. A single PC would have enough processing power to run the bitcoin network. All of this power usage goes towards solving useless tasks which get more difficult the more people there are trying to solve them.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    If the coin's point is to become valuable to the point that people want it to trade it, then a PoW coin does have to require more overall compute power to crunch the numbers on the ever-increasing amount of transactions that might be attempting to double-spend on the chain. This is all because of PoW's lack of focus on efficiency when there is that much demand and that many transactions happening at once. Electricity, hardware, and profitability are all externalities that are the result by the amount of usage of a PoW coin, not the cause of it. > When a coin spikes in value, the profitability goes up so more miners join in. A single PC would have enough processing power to run the bitcoin network. well, yes, but then a single miner could and would control the entire network since 'why would any give up their compute power for free to ensure the network is not being hit by double-spend attacks, when someone else is already doing it'. The whole point of a PoW coin having huge fees and thus returns for the miners is to incentivize a decentralized ledger. I don't think Satoshi intended for it to eventually consolidate into just a few huge mining companies which theoretically could perform a double-spend attack, but it's not something that could have been protected against with a few more if statements (although, if this happened, the coin would tank in value, which is probably the inherit safeguard).
noxer 5y ago
From the FAQ Page: >What about Ripple/IOTA/...? >As with Proof of Stake we are aware of no existing, alternative protocol that has solved the problem of distributed consensus. Usually these approaches have resulted in some form of centralized authority becoming an important factor in the security model. >Of course a centralized systems can achieve a far greater energy efficiency. Here we want to compare only distributed systems and their properties. ---------- Everyone should know by now that Ripple is a company not a blockchain. And the XRPL is fully decentral with no authority at all. See XRPL.org
- makomk 5y ago
  Ripple is pretty much fully centralised last I checked - there's a list of nodes controlled by the company and a few other companies involved in setting it up which decide which version of transaction history is valid, and nodes outside that list have no say in their decisions. In theory you can use your own list of nodes, but it's a bad idea to ever do so. Since who you choose to trust has no effect on the Ripple-sanctioned set of transactions and you really don't want your version of history to ever diverge from theirs because then you'll disagree with everyone else on the planet about which transactions are valid, diverging from their chosen trusted list has only downsides.
  - noxer 5y ago
    Did you read the post? Ripple is a company ofc its centralized. The XRPL is the "blockchain" and its NOT controlled by Ripple. They maintain the open source code that does not give any control over the running network at all. >Ripple-sanctioned set of transactions Thats a made up thing. There is not a single Tx that has ever been "sanctioned" on the XRPL Its also simply not possible. You are completely misinformed or intentionally spreading FUD. The time when Ripple ran the whole network is long gone.
- fastball 5y ago
  Does XRPL no longer have a unique node list that is mostly under the control of Ripple (because they maintain the default that clients automatically use)? https://cryptobriefing.com/is-xrp-decentralized-ripples-involvement-cryptocurrency/ https://cryptobriefing.com/is-xrp-decentralized-ripples-invo... Could the system still be decentralized in practice? Sure. But the fact that the Ripple CTO claimed XRP might be more decentralized than BTC or ETH makes me take the rest of their claims with huge buckets of salt.
baby 5y ago
> It is great to see effort being put into researching cleaner alternatives. Unfortunately, there is no working PoS-based system that does not rely on some degree of centralization in its security model. This is false. See Algorand, Cardano, Mina, etc. Proof-of-work is very much a technology of the past. It's the fossil fuel of cryptocurrencies.
- tylercubell 5y ago
  Additionally, Algorand has pledged [1] to be carbon-negative. [1]: https://www.algorand.com/resources/news/carbon_negative_announcement https://www.algorand.com/resources/news/carbon_negative_anno...
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  Algorand isn't currently decentralized. They have a list of approx 100 relays required for the network to function that they control tied to a centralized single domain.
  - baby 5y ago
    Do you have a good source on that? This is not the first time I hear this. Btw I’ve studied the consensus protocol and it fulfills promises of decentralization so I’m wondering why they are using some single points of failure pieces (it is decentralized from a safety perspective: you can’t double spend, but it’s possible that some pieces are centralized). My guess is efficiency.
    - encryptluks2 5y ago
      https://algorand.foundation/faq https://algorand.foundation/faq Who manages the list of relay nodes? What about decentralization? > Currently, the Algorand Foundation manages the official list of relay nodes... > We are working on a model where the decisions on relay nodes will be done in a more decentralized way. As for the centralized domain, you can look it up in the source code but essentially it gets the list of relays from a SRV record on the algorand.network domain: _algobootstrap._tcp.mainnet.algorand.network
SubiculumCode 5y ago
Ethereum's move to proof of stake (in process now) should improve its carbon profile. Further, with the Polygon Commit Chain working with Ethereum, I believe that carbon emission will not be a major concern.
zeofig 5y ago
Largely meaningless numbers, because energy efficiency scales inversely (loosely speaking) with network size. You can do some nice tricks to improve efficiency, but the scaling will never be good, as these networks all use the same consensus algorithms. The only project I've seen with fundamentally superior scaling is Avalanche, but it's new technology and I'm not yet entirely convinced.
GhostVII 5y ago
Kind of a self-defeating list. As a PoW cryptocurrency becomes more popular, the value of a single coin goes up, so the mining reward will go up in terms of USD. As a result, the equilibrium energy usage in mining goes up proportionally to the increase in value. So if people start using a cryptocurrency because it is more efficient, it will stop being efficient.
jv0010 5y ago
Chia (XCH) coin would be interesting to see on that list seeing it basis was being an eco friendly crypto
- Milkman128 5y ago
  If you can account for the resources of each hard drive it kills
  - agravier 5y ago
    Indeed, we should also account for such material resources allocated or wasted by all proof-of-some-resource crypto. Like the number of GPUS hoarded up by a non-ASIC PoW coin, or even the manufacturing of specialized miners.
  - Taek 5y ago
    There's probably enough data out already on how long hard drives last while mining Chia to make a reasonable estimate. It kills hard drives fast enough that a large percentage of hard drives which were mining at genesis are now dead.
  - c1sc0 5y ago
    There actually is an estimate of this floating in the chia Keybase channel. I remember it being very low, but there are many variables. Even at 100x the estimate it came down to less than 10 million USD in CO2 offsets.
JulianMorrison 5y ago
Isn't this basically 1 / popularity? I'm presuming other coins have the Bitcoin feature of getting harder as more powerful miners appear.
- h4kor 5y ago
  Basically, yes. There are minor improvements to be made to keep the reward for miners as low as possible. In the end the energy consumption comes down to burning energy proportional to the block reward. https://blog.libove.org/posts/the-cost-of-proof-of-work/ https://blog.libove.org/posts/the-cost-of-proof-of-work/
mudlus 5y ago
This chart is nice, but you need to include the difficulty of the algorithm (difficulty to attack), the size of the blockchain (hard for anyone except rich people to participate if you need a server farm just to verify a transaction), developer activity, and each coin should have a collapsable subset of “layer-2” options (eg. Lightning and liquid for Bitcoin), and their statistics as well. Most importantly, A “transaction” on a blockchain is not a “transaction” in the colloquial sense.
- xur17 5y ago
  I was going to comment on this as well - different coins made different decisions on how to scale their blockchains. Some have an expensive base chain with the intent of moving most transactions to layer 2. Some have a cheap layer 1 with lots of transactions. Some have a mix of the 2. There are different tradeoffs for each approach, but I'd love to see some of these scaling attempts included rather than just assuming that layer 1 transactions are the only ones that matter.
yayr 5y ago
There will be a time, where we have legislation to ban energy-inefficient crypto-currencies from being traded on regulated exchanges. This would make any proof of work currency essentially useless in the legislated areas. My bet is, EU will start, others will follow. This will lead to pressure to convert BTC, ETH etc. finally to proof of stake variants.
Pauldb8 5y ago
There is a lot of ignorance going around here. Bitcoin SV is cheaper because it can handle vastly more transactions per block, making it more efficient. Bitcoin SV believes in unrestricted scalability. Yes mostly this means miners will tend to agglomerate, and specialize I to big data center. Well know public entities that must follow law. but we believe all miners also have an incentive to not let any other gros past 50%. Today none is more than 38%, so we're safe. And also we have had big blocks with hundred of thousand of transaction. these block generate a lot of transaction fee, sometimes more than the mining reward ! Which we all know will decrease over time, to only rely on tx fee. Which BSV embraces. The node has been worked on to support Tera Node, with Tera Block, and billions of tx, the world of tomorrow, the enterprise grade blockchain. Yes indeed it's more environmental friendly to be more efficient.
- onion-soup 5y ago
  Why is this getting downvoted?
  - impassionedrule 5y ago
    Because Bitcoin SV's potentially huge block size restricts who can actually run a node, making it very centralized
    - dudewhat1 5y ago
      look at BTC miners with 1mb blocks and its only a few big ones with majority of hash power. Its the inevitable 80/20
LAMike 5y ago
If anyone wants to learn about BSV, simply Google "Florida perjury Craig Wright"
- oogabooga123 5y ago
  Or search “Bitcoin SV”, what does celebrity gossip have to do with this
  - ronsor 5y ago
    Craig Wright claims to be Satoshi and is the creator of Bitcoin SV.
    - baby 5y ago
      (And is basically a con artist)
- nibunabu 5y ago
  If anyone wants to learn about LAMike and other paid anti-bitcoin shills simply check this out, its a 5min read and worth your time https://thatsbtcnotbitcoin.com/ https://thatsbtcnotbitcoin.com/ "Today, most crypto exchanges, prominent competitor blockchains, coin market cap aggregators, crypto news outlets, etc. are owned by the same few companies who crippled BTC (Mastercard, Pedophile Epstein etc.), and you will never find unbiased information about BSV there or almost anywhere else either because it threatens their entire investment portfolio and they need all the money they can get so they can keep on raping children.
marsven_422 5y ago
Like "x% of crypto runs on green energy" this is a irrelevant argument. The energy could have been put to better uses.
swinglock 5y ago
It would be interesting to also be able to sort by how much value measured in USD or troy ounces the different networks secure.
- wmf 5y ago
  Are you talking about market cap or something else?
onion-soup 5y ago
Glad to see BSV finally getting noticed by HN
anon776 5y ago
Bitcoin cash and SV are low on the carbon emission cause they forked from BTC right? So they re-used bitcoins early work. Or am I totally wrong here?
- onion-soup 5y ago
  No, Because SV does not limit block size which allows tremendous throughput. Google block size war. >re-used bitcoins early work All forks share the same blockchain up until certain block.
  - zhoujianfu 5y ago
    We’ll, for POW coins the “energy efficiency” falls directly out of the market cap divided by the number of transactions. BSV has essentially free transactions and not a high market cap, and so has a (suspiciously?) high txn count to price ratio.
    - onion-soup 5y ago
      No, txs are cheap because blocks are big enough to allow high throuoghput. BTC has 1 MB block so txs compete to get into next bloock.
- baby 5y ago
  Less users and smaller price => fewer miners
- lawn 5y ago
  No, they use less energy because their price is lower, but they're more efficient because they scale better than Bitcoin. (But BSV scales in an unhealthy manner.)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
everflow 5y ago
Get the signals or stay poor. Elon Musk said that BTC should increase the block. Who is the only person who has worked to increase the bitcoin block? obviously Dr Craig Steven Wright ... Current block is 638MB
- everfree 5y ago
  Worked? All he did was raise a number in the code. Bitcoin could have raised that number too, but they chose not to, because the higher the number is raised, the harder it is to verify the Bitcoin blockchain on consumer hardware.
kordlessagain 5y ago
What can 1 Mwhr do? > Drive an electric vehicle 3,600 miles.
everflow 5y ago
See yourself PoW currencies ranked by energy efficiency https://coincarboncap.com/ https://coincarboncap.com/
- gruez 5y ago
  Why are you re-linking the OP?
cft 5y ago
The most important thing to watch out for in this type of articles is for this push by certain anti-market interests to not succeed in a mining or even an outright Bitcoin ban in the West. They are using both environmental angle and an terrorist angle to justify a potential action, that can range from a new type of mining tax to an outright Bitcoin ban.
SirTen 5y ago
Why do they just ignore proof of stake mainstream coins like Cardano ADA, its super efficient, functional, and rewards holders. Musk is blind.
- miked85 5y ago
  Probably because the title/page explicitly says it is comparing PoW currencies.
takeda 5y ago
Total noob, but I'm wondering since generating the blockchain (at least with bitcoin) is about finding match (or should I say) partial match of a specific hash. Could that information be somehow used to cracking encryption that relies on cryptographic hashes?
- lawn 5y ago
  No, it gives you no information.
xx789 5y ago
So basically they're all bad except for SV? 1 Gallon of gas makes 2.4 kg emissions, so instead of swiping a card its burning a few gallons of gas, or 50 gallons for BTC.
- baby 5y ago
  Rather, they are all bad. Proof of stake cryptocurrencies is the state of the art in consensus protocols today, not proof of work. This is mostly a ranking of who’s the worst among the worse technologies.
Proven 5y ago
Yeah like anyone cares about that when investing or speculating
ordinaryradical 5y ago
PoW in conjunction with blockchain is anti-efficiency by design. It’s a principle of the ledger’s security and an inevitability that mature networks waste energy in exchange for that. Anyone serious about this topic needs to think beyond blockchain into fundamentally different technologies, like Nano, or things which forego decentralization entirely.
ArtTimeInvestor 5y ago
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/
mrb 5y ago
The "most efficient" cryptocurrencies on this list are the least secure, ie. the ones where double-spend attacks are the least expensive to conduct.
xtat 5y ago
Uhh, Bitcoin SV is super sketch though and this chart feels like a veiled shill for it.
- illconnect 5y ago
  What makes BSV super sketch?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
vldr 5y ago
It doesn't mention any PoS solution (which are, compared to PoW) extremely energy efficient. They do mention in the FAQ that they're not included since they still depend on some sort of centralization, but as far as I know this is not true for, for example, avalanche (https://avax.network https://avax.network) It's not really clear who is behind this site and if there's some hidden agenda. Let's assume not (but with crypto you can never be sure) and that they will properly consider PoS blockchains if they are as decentralized (or more) as the listed PoW chains.
- jillesvangurp 5y ago
  I think Ethereum 2.0 is currently demonstrating at scale that proof of stake works fine and can be secure against hordes of very incentivized hackers trying to cheat. That should hopefully bury the whole proof of stake is centralized argument. The notion of centralization has its roots in a different concept: permissioned vs. permissionless blockchains. Ethereum (1 and 2) and Bitcoin are both permissionless in the sense that anyone can become a node in the network and start earning gas. Ethereum 2.0 does not change that. You can still join and earn gas on it. Permissioned blockchains such as Stellar, Ripple and a few other networks are more closed. You can join the network but you don't have the same status as the core nodes in the network that are explicitly configured to trust each other. This makes e.g. 50% attacks from the outside impossible. E.g. Stellar works this way. You can become a stellar validator but nodes have to specify which other nodes they trust and that gives the first nodes a lot of power. In the case of Stellar there are only a few dozen validators run by organizations working with the Stellar foundation. Stellar has indicated that they want to gradually open up and eventually become permissionless. But as of yet they are too small to make that work and are relying a lot on a small set of validators run by just a handful of companies. There's a list of active nodes here: https://stellarbeat.io/nodes https://stellarbeat.io/nodes Such permissioned networks are great for e.g. banks that need to make sure they aren't doing transactions via some dodgy nodes in North Korea, Iran, etc. Technically, blockchains like this are not that different from public blockchains. There's nothing stopping these from opening up except that they choose not to. For a lot of businesses, that's a feature not a bug.
  - 5y ago
glaive123 5y ago
If you want a list of PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by security and decentralization, just reverse the list.
sharperguy 5y ago
How did you include all the transactions made on the cryptocurrencies various lightning networks? I guess that could be quite hard to measure, since they aren't stored on the blockchain, although are equally valid transactions on the network.
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
If the U.S. were to tax crypto to balance this harm, how would it best do so?
corona-research 5y ago
Many people on hackernews assume they are very smart and special while the truth is that they are brainwashed into praising slavery
spinny 5y ago
People that complain that PoW cryptos spend too much energy don't understand that it's just another form of conversion of energy, just like every other action human take. Average Joe has a manual labor, his physical energy is converted into labor, which converts to fiat currency. The food that Joe ate also require some amount of energy to grow and become Joe's food. PoW mining converts raw electric energy into a digitally transmissible currency
- smt88 5y ago
  You don't understand the point that you're arguing against. Producing fiat currency through manual labor uses a mix of renewable resources, and value is provided. You can't just dig in the ground and get paid for it. You have to do something that improves someone's business or life. Producing crypto is just turning coal (or whatever) into numbers. There is no intrinsic value created in that chain. If the crypto loses value, you may have even destroyed resources in the world for no reason. It's a net-negative.
  - spinny 5y ago
    The cost of producing fiat currency is not the same for everybody. Producing crypto keeps a secure ledger, claiming it's just producing useless numbers is the same as claiming that a TLS session is just playing around with numbers. The value of fiat always goes to 0, resources have been destroyed in the world for no reason
    - smt88 5y ago
      If I pay someone to build me a house, I have a house and they have fiat. We converted energy into a house and fiat. If I convert the same amount of energy into crypto, I have nothing with intrinsic value. And before you say that fiat has no intrinsic value, consider that most people have fiat debt (loans, taxes, wages, etc.) that they can pay off with it. Currently very few people have any crypto debt.
      - spinny 5y ago
Geee 5y ago
PoW doesn't make transactions. The purpose is to secure the network. It's useful to compare this to the cost of attack: https://www.crypto51.app https://www.crypto51.app (this data is somewhat outdated) Also, this doesn't take off-chain transactions into account. There's way more actual financial transactions on Bitcoin when every L2 transaction is counted. Lightning network scales to billions of transactions per second, without adding PoW energy consumption.
illconnect 5y ago
I’m helping
prepend 5y ago
Are there any coins with a reasonable transaction cost? It seems shocking to me the USD-normalized cost per transaction given that the actual cost should be near zero. Visa/MC has a cost of like $.25+some percent so I suppose represents the cost of having a trusted oracle with fraud, review, etc. This seems like it should be the standard to beat for whether a currency can actually be used for anything normal and necessary to get wide uptake.
- licnep 5y ago
  Look at the website OP linked. The first one, Bitcoin SV, has a median transaction fee of just $0.0001 In fact it's being used in several projects where people send each other micropayments of just a couple cents, like twetch.app
  - prepend 5y ago
    It’s good that it’s used in some places and hopefully will grow in acceptance for stuff like basic purchases.
TenthYoung 5y ago
Bitcoin SV is actually awesome. I'm honestly tempted to quit my job to build on it.
danielyaa5 5y ago
I wonder what the metrics are on a credit card transaction?
webinvest 5y ago
I’m not sure whether Stellar Lumens (XLM) counts as POW, POS or something else but it sure is energy efficient. It’s also the 3rd most popular cryptocurrency on Coinbase. https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellar/comments/nbqfey/since_co2_emissions_are_on_peoples_minds_right/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellar/comments/nbqfey/since_co2_e...

360 points by GBiT 5y ago

This is dumb. The transaction confirmations are not equivalent between chains.

Cool chart! Interesting to see how much of an outlier Bitcoin is. The middle tier currencies in this list (USDC, USDT, etc) are built on Ethereum, so once Ethereum finishes its switch over to proof-of-stake, both they and Ethereum will drop down to almost nothing in terms of power used per transaction.

Judgmentality 5y ago
> so once Ethereum finishes its switch over to proof-of-stake Isn't there a lot of uncertainty as to how well proof-of-stake will work?
- danielvf 5y ago
  ETH2 (proof-of-stake) already has 16 billion dollars of ETH locked into it, and has been running for months. The proof-of-stake switchover seems to be on a good track and should work form technical standpoint.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - dvh 5y ago
    Python 3 is better than python 2 and people will soon switch.
    - chrisco255 5y ago
      Programming language upgrades are not the same as blockchain upgrades. Blockchains work on consensus, so you need a majority of nodes to agree with your changes to the chain or you risk a hard fork. At any rate, ETH2 proof-of-stake is already live, the last remaining piece is The Merge, which merges the existing proof-of-work chain into the already live and operational ETH2 proof-of-stake validator nodes.
    - viraptor 5y ago
      People have largely switched already. Py2 is gone from default installs these days. So yes, even if it takes a while, people often do switch to better solutions.
      - Judgmentality 5y ago
        https://dev.to/hugovk/python-version-share-over-time-6-1jb8 https://dev.to/hugovk/python-version-share-over-time-6-1jb8 It seems like Python 2 is still pretty prevalent, with over 40% of new downloads taking place as of last year. And people forget Python 3 was originally introduced in 2008. So the transition is taking decades, not years. The last place I worked was still using Python 2 as of last year, and they were a startup without all the bureaucracy of a big company. They also had plenty of money and engineers. Python 2 is still the default for everybody I know.
        jreese 5y ago
        PyPI stats for "six", the second most popular package, that's used for 2/3 compatibility in tons of libraries, shows 80% of its millions of daily downloads are for Python 3. [1] The proportion for "requests", a building block for a ton of long-standing packages, is even higher. Anyone using Python 2 at this point are either supporting legacy software, getting their runtimes/packages from distros rather than PyPI, or otherwise completely checked out of the modern Python ecosystem. 1: https://pypistats.org/packages/six https://pypistats.org/packages/six
        imtringued 5y ago
        There are people who are not using segwit on Bitcoin even though it means they spend twice as much on Bitcoin transaction fees. https://transactionfee.info/charts/payments-spending-segwit/ https://transactionfee.info/charts/payments-spending-segwit/
        takeda 5y ago
        That statistics end at most interesting time: December 2019. Starting with January, python 2 was officially EOL, and many packages dropped support for it. Right now developing for Python 2 is kind of tough, because most dependencies won't work.
    - dcolkitt 5y ago
      Well if Python 2 had a logic bomb that literally makes it unusable after the end-of-life date, that would be true.
      - takeda 5y ago
        It kind of has. I mean if you don't touch your code it will continue to work but if you have to maintain it, you quickly realize that a lot of your dependencies will refuse to work. It might be easy to fix them to work again, but with time it will be more and more work to do.
      - Taek 5y ago
        Ethereum's original logic bomb was set to trigger in 2017. Then later it was updated to trigger in 2017. And then later it was updated to trigger in 2018, and then 2020, and currently I believe it's set to trigger in 2022. But there's no political reason to believe that they won't just push it out again. It's just a ceremony at this point.
- chrisco255 5y ago
  No, proof-of-stake has been live since December. The final remaining migration is The Merge, which is estimated to occur towards the end of this year, March 2022 at the absolute latest. For more info, see: https://ethmerge.com/ https://ethmerge.com/
- wyager 5y ago
  It's the kind of thing where if it fails, it's going to fail explosively and unexpectedly. Proof-of-stake is vulnerable to various miner collusion attacks that Bitcoin is not vulnerable to. The gist of it is that casting multiple conflicting votes (sometimes way after you cast your original vote) doesn't require any additional resources in a proof-of-stake system, whereas casting additional votes in a proof-of-work system is very expensive.
  - SubiculumCode 5y ago
    I may be wrong, but collusion is hard to achieve via provably random selection procedures for validators of transactions, etc.
    - wyager 5y ago
      Network participants are free to ignore the results of provably random selection procedures and “re-roll”. In general there is no known way to impose real cost on protocol violations like this. This is the genius of PoW; it uniquely associates real-world expenditures with protocol actions. It’s probably impossible to replicate this in a more efficient, but still secure and reliable, way.
      - dane-pgp 5y ago
        I'm not sure if this is how it works, but it should be possible to avoid the "re-roll" problem: Each node picks a random value, and publishes the hash of it to the blockchain, then, when the network has reached finality on what all the hashes are, the nodes publish the random values themselves, and the network takes the XOR of all of them.
        wyager 5y ago
        Nodes can simply choose not to publish their value if the result is unfavorable to them, and this tanks the whole procedure. This isn’t a problem unique to your scheme; they all suffer from things like this.
onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
Am I reading something wrong? To me, it looks like it is saying that Bitcoin uses 830kWh and Ethereum uses almost 38 times that. Considering >1% of the world's energy is used by Bitcoin - it seems virtually impossible for Ethereum to use 38x more energy...
- terhechte 5y ago
  Bitcoin SV != Bitcoin. SV is a Bitcoin fork. Bitcoin is at the bottom of the list
- chrisco255 5y ago
  Bitcoin SV is a barely used esoteric fork of Bitcoin with a $5.5B market cap. It's a cash grab from a minority fork of BTC or BCH miners.
  - 988747 5y ago
    It is fun to see something with $5.5B market cap being called "esoteric" and "barely used". I wish I had a side project with similar market cap :P
    - wmf 5y ago
      This is a sign that market caps are irrelevant, the whole crypto scene is crazy, or both.
      - duskwuff 5y ago
        Market caps get extra weird for cryptocurrencies which are created as forks of an existing chain, because everyone who held the original coin at the time of the fork technically holds an equal number of the forked coins, even if the owners of those coins have never interacted with the fork.
        X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
        Not to mention exchanges that didn't participate in the fork
GBiT 5y ago
We will see how proof of stake will work, and in FAQ is a paper about it. POS have one big problem, that you only have to buy coins once and stake them and you will get richer every day by doing nothing without any additional investment. Basically it will make rich richer and more centralized. We will see how it will works in future.
- Cantinflas 5y ago
  This is not true, you have to run a validator to get rewarded. Rewards will be much less than miners get now, and the whole "rich get richer" is literally how investment works in basically anything, even Bitcoin mining
  - GBiT 5y ago
    Yes, running a validator will cost some money. I will explain how I think. If the rich want to get richer he have to make good investment decisions and some work. In POS you don't have to do anything at all, just buy and hold. So in POS, you don't need to innovate your business model. In POW, you always have to innovate to be a leader. Bitcoin ASIC innovation in last years shows how strong competition is. And competition makes innovation. In POS you just keep coins and stake them. Thats it
    - shawnz 5y ago
      This is often claimed to be an advantage of PoS: you can't get an extra increase in rate of profits by being richer (beyond the linear increase you'd expect). With PoW on the other hand, the richest have the best access to the most innovative technology and so you get superlinear profits the richer you are.
      - GBiT 5y ago
        Real world case: Intel had the most advanced chip and more money, until one day AMD got better. In POS this scenario is impossible. First will always be first.
      - 5y ago
chrisco255 5y ago
Are they double-counting the Ethereum tokens like Chainlink, Uniswap, etc? Ethereum hashing inherently includes ERC20 transactions. ERC20s are just state changes on the Ethereum blockchain and don't affect hashing use or non-use.
- 22c 5y ago
  It's not really clear how any of this is calculated, considering the vast majority of USDC and USDT transactions occur off chain.
bhaak 5y ago
USDT does not run solely on Ethereum. Currently it's about 50:50 Ethereum and Tron (of all things!). https://wallet.tether.to/transparency https://wallet.tether.to/transparency USDC is likewise a multichain stablecoin (Ethereum, Stellar, Algorand, and Solana) but I couldn't find information on how much is on each chain.
- 22c 5y ago
  I'm also assuming that these transparency reports don't count when an asset has been bridged to another network. A big chunk of USDC and USDT floating around on smaller PoS networks have been bridged from ERC20, so would appear to be idling on ERC20 but could actually be exchanging hands on a completely separate network.

huntertwo 5y ago

This is a solid idea, but needs more currencies like Cardano and Polkadot that claim energy efficiency as their strength

ujuj 5y ago
Wouldn't it be harder to evaluate in PoS-based cryptocurrencies?
- baby 5y ago
  Not really, you can evaluate PoS-based by the bandwidth and the message complexity of their consensus mechanism and the space required to sync and run a node.
- 0134340 5y ago
  PoS still encourages using more powerful hardware and faster internet because it equates to more transactions. That said, I've seen people use Pi's as stakers. But you can still test the current draw per transaction much the same as with PoW currencies.
  - baby 5y ago
    More power doesn’t equate to more throughput in PoS schemes, unless everyone is increasing their power and communication isn’t your bottleneck, but even then there’s a quick ceiling you’ll reach.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
everfree 5y ago
PoS-based cryptocurrencies use thousands of times less electricity than PoW-based ones, so all PoW cryptos would be above all PoS cryptos in the ranking. It wouldn't be an interesting chart.
- wmf 5y ago

dheera 5y ago

Mildly off topic question: If one had Bitcoin in an exchange instead of an offline wallet, does that mean that when forks occur, the exchange does not give you coins in the fork? Also, what about PoS coins? Aren't those vastly more efficient than any of these?

danielvf 5y ago
That depends on the exchange. Some of them do, if the fork eventually becomes very popular. It's not anything to count on though.
Sekhmet 5y ago
> If one had Bitcoin in an exchange instead of an offline wallet, does that mean that when forks occur, the exchange does not give you coins in the fork? In most cases you do get new coins post-fork. Exchange will announce whether they support the fork or not before it happens, so you can react.

gruez 5y ago

There's a [dead] comment that brings up a good point, so I'll repost it here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27176459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27176459 > This is dumb. The transaction confirmations are not equivalent between chains. Specifically, if there were two identical cryptocurrencies that only differ by difficulty (eg. coin A with difficulty of 1 and coin B with difficulty of 10), the coin with the lower difficulty might be 10x more efficient, but also 10x easier to rewrite. For proof of stake coins, it's essentially "free" if you can get enough people on board (since you won't be penalized, only the losing chain would be).

mistrial9 5y ago

if a huge hydro power generator in a remote location on a far away continent wastes local energy, does my city power bill go up? because of BTC ? tell me more

glutamate 5y ago
FTFY: If a huge coal power station emits tons of CO2 to mine funnycoins for cryptobros, will the sea levels still rise?
zdragnar 5y ago
Might be. If the hydro generator isn't supplying enough energy to the local area because of BTC, then presumably a higher load falls on petro energy to fill in the gap in supply. That influences the global market a tiny amount. Your power bill likewise is affected, presuming your provider has any petro in its supply mix, which it likely does (even if only as a backup). The impact is tiny to nonexistent at a scale of 1, but for numbers greater than 1 the impact likewise increases.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  Or more succinctly: Electricity tends to be fungible and move over geographically large networks, so most of it is probably interchangeable even over large areas/distance.
  - zdragnar 5y ago
    I think this is less true for purely renewable grids separated by large continents. The amount of concrete and steel needed to move solar from the Sahara to Finland makes the energy very much not green anymore. Petro energy- natural gas, diesel plus coal- don't really concern themselves with CO2 and can use existing transportation to get to remote areas, so the energy produced is very much more fungible on a global scale.
  - gruez 5y ago
    It really isn't. Quebec has rock bottom prices for electricity but 250mi away in boston the electricity cost several times more. https://www.hydroquebec.com/data/documents-donnees/pdf/comparison-electricity-prices.pdf https://www.hydroquebec.com/data/documents-donnees/pdf/compa...

JohnGB 5y ago

You've left out PeerCoin (PPC) the original PoW cryptocurrency which has been in constant operation and development since 2013. It is by far the most energy efficient, as that was one of the main goals in the design of PeerCoin.

everfree 5y ago
Original PoS cryptocurrency, I think you mean.

crazypython 5y ago

Note that Bitcoin SV is completely controlled by miners, a 51% attack can change the rules. In the original Bitcoin, a 51% attack can only reverse recent transactions, not change the rules or compromise stored funds.

pmorici 5y ago
Bitcoin SV was the result of a sociopath who lied about being Satoshi Nakamoto and supporters of Bitcoin core encouraged it because it fit their political goals.
dudewhat1 5y ago
Yea if you want to spend millions if not billions to 51% attack it and the public nature of bitcoin is such that everyone would know who attacked it leaving them legally liable then be my guest. There is more incentive not to attack it than there is to attack it. when will people realize this.
- donio 5y ago
  What sort of legal liability though? What law, regulation or contract would they be violating?

wmf 5y ago

Txs / MWh is not a valid metric for most cryptocurrencies since power consumption is proportional to price, not transactions. Also, BSV and BCH are totally insecure so it's not really fair to compare them to secure cryptocurrencies.

qeternity 5y ago
Of course it’s a valid metric. The whole point of this is that most crypto is not used to transact, but to speculate, and so a high price and therefore high carbon footprint with a low transaction throughput is often the whole point of these analyses.
- shawnz 5y ago
  Transactions aren't the only thing which makes cryptocurrencies useful, and even then, cryptocurrency transactions aren't directly comparable to each other or to transactions in traditional financial systems since they can have a much different risk profile. Furthermore it's not obvious that increased transaction rates are necessary yet in most cryptocurrencies and so it might not make sense to optimize for that yet. There is no point encouraging frivolous data to be added to the blockchain permanently if the demand to make useful transactions isn't there yet.
pmorici 5y ago
It's proportional to the value a miner is awarded (ie: block reward + transaction fess) for mining a block not the price of the coin. Saying it is the price of the coin is like saying Berkshire Hathaway is worth more than Apple because their share price is a lot higher.
- lvs 5y ago
  No, I think you misunderstand. The rewards are predictable, and fees are generally a tiny fraction of the total reward (a few percent or less). The exchange rate vs the price of electricity is what determines whether it's profitable to consume electricity to hash for a PoW chain. There are some efficiency hacks like merged mining that improve the situation a bit, but essentially the person you're downvoting is totally correct.

dehrmann 5y ago

This actually points out why Tesla not accepting bitcoin for environmental reasons is silly: 134.0 kg of CO2 per transaction about as much CO2 as a tank of gas. This is ridiculously inefficient, but it's a car; the energy inputs are already high. The real issue is the interest Musk created when Tesla bought bitcoin a few months ago and how he grew a conscious suspiciously fast.

nr2x 5y ago
Wondering how overstretched his financials are if he’s turning to btc pump and dump schemes.

evanrich 5y ago

Would eth2.0 have a significantly higher txs/mwh? I have read 99% reduction in some places. Seems well positioned to top this list.

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
Yes should be about 1% of what it is now. This is is why I am investing hard in Ethereum right now while I still can. I truly do not see Bitcoin sustaining much longer as the top coin.
rawtxapp 5y ago
Yes, due to the 2nd layer solutions it's going to bring along. You have the same idea in Bitcoin called lightning network (with growing adoption: 1ml.com).
baby 5y ago
They’re moving to proof of stake so yes, soon

toomim 5y ago

As a Bitcoin miner (https://toom.im https://toom.im), while I appreciate the work put into it, this particular metric of "transactions per kW" might not work the way you expect. The main point that you should understand is that a PoW blockchain's energy usage is not proportional to its transactions. I'll say that a different way: the transactions themselves do not use any energy in mining. I'll say this in a third way: it takes exactly the same amount of energy to mine an empty block as it does a 1GB block of transactions, as it does a 1,000,000,000 PB block. In reality, transactions are all hashed together in a mining pool into a single numeric hash before miners ever see them. It doesn't matter how many transactions are included in the hash. The hashpower just has to find a magic number matching that hash. On the other hand, the #1 factor that increases a blockchain's energy usage is its price per coin. The price of a coin is how much that coin is worth to be mined, which is the incentive for miners to dump energy into mining it. In steady state, miners will dump energy into mining a coin until the cost of energy = the value of the coins coming out. This is why you can see Bitcoin SV at the top of the list -- it's worth the least of the Bitcoins. And it's also misleading to compute the second factor -- transactions per second -- by counting the actual transactions on the blockchain, rather than looking at the transaction capacity. Because blockchains only cost something per transaction once they reach capacity. This is misleading with Bitcoin SV, for instance, because that coin artificially creates bogus transactions on its blockchain in order to make it look popular and demonstrate the vision of large blockchains. Bitcoin Cash, on the other hand, can handle a thousands of transactions per second (on testnet) but doesn't clog its live blockchain with them. So, in sum, if you send a transaction on Bitcoin Cash, it will cost 0 kW of electricity, even though it says 31.3 Txs/MWh (which equates to 31.9kW/Tx) in this chart. This is because transactions do not cost anything in electricity. Electricity only goes to preventing double-spends. A better metric would be "energy use per double-spend that was prevented."

toomim 5y ago
And to be complete, there are other ways that PoW blockchains can compete on energy efficiency: 1) Inflation rate 2) PoW function 3) Transaction cost after blocksize limit reached The inflation rate determines the incentive given to miners. With less incentive, the energy use will go down. This comes at the cost of increasing the ease of a double-spend, but there is already far more than enough difficulty to double-spend at the current mining rates. The PoW function determines the capital cost required to buy the miners themselves. If you increase the capital costs (e.g. with a memory-hard PoW function, or requiring less-efficient GPUs instead of more-efficient ASICs) then miners will be able to spend less of their costs on energy. This is one way in which Eth does well by the above metric, and is a valid way to reduce energy usage in PoW. Of course, transitioning to proof-of-stake (as eth is doing) will eliminate the energy problem entirely. Finally, some blockchains (e.g. BTC, ETH) have reached their capacity of transactions per second, and then users can add a fee to each transaction to incentivize mining pools to include them in a block. These fees do add incentive for miners to dump energy into their blocks. However, they are a much smaller portion of the incentive than you would expect.

asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago

A fascinating thought experiment would be to have a further breakdown by "non-speculative" transaction. It's difficult/impossible to compute whether a transaction's purpose is speculation, but given that that's most of what these coins are currently used for, it would surprise me if less than half of these transactions are for the purpose of price speculation. This is going to make these coins compare substantially less favorably compared to e.g. credit cards or cash money.

duskwuff 5y ago
For the vast majority of cryptocurrencies, especially once you get beyond the "big two" of Bitcoin and Ethereum, I suspect that virtually all (>99%) transactions are speculative in nature.

bogota 5y ago

Interesting but I’m not sure of the point. PoW by design is not energy efficient. The incentive is just not in the correct place. Interesting but if the goal is to show more energy efficient coins we need to be looking at different tech such as PoS. Although this might have just been a fun project someone put together in which case nice job.

mmmeff 5y ago
Truth, I was hoping to see how the greener DAG networks like IOTA and Cardano stack up here.
SilverRed 5y ago
Efficiency doesn't even make sense since mining can take up close to no, or infinite power. The amount of energy a PoW coin uses entirely depends on the cost of electricity, hardware, and profitability. When a coin spikes in value, the profitability goes up so more miners join in. A single PC would have enough processing power to run the bitcoin network. All of this power usage goes towards solving useless tasks which get more difficult the more people there are trying to solve them.
- judge2020 5y ago
  If the coin's point is to become valuable to the point that people want it to trade it, then a PoW coin does have to require more overall compute power to crunch the numbers on the ever-increasing amount of transactions that might be attempting to double-spend on the chain. This is all because of PoW's lack of focus on efficiency when there is that much demand and that many transactions happening at once. Electricity, hardware, and profitability are all externalities that are the result by the amount of usage of a PoW coin, not the cause of it. > When a coin spikes in value, the profitability goes up so more miners join in. A single PC would have enough processing power to run the bitcoin network. well, yes, but then a single miner could and would control the entire network since 'why would any give up their compute power for free to ensure the network is not being hit by double-spend attacks, when someone else is already doing it'. The whole point of a PoW coin having huge fees and thus returns for the miners is to incentivize a decentralized ledger. I don't think Satoshi intended for it to eventually consolidate into just a few huge mining companies which theoretically could perform a double-spend attack, but it's not something that could have been protected against with a few more if statements (although, if this happened, the coin would tank in value, which is probably the inherit safeguard).

noxer 5y ago

From the FAQ Page: >What about Ripple/IOTA/...? >As with Proof of Stake we are aware of no existing, alternative protocol that has solved the problem of distributed consensus. Usually these approaches have resulted in some form of centralized authority becoming an important factor in the security model. >Of course a centralized systems can achieve a far greater energy efficiency. Here we want to compare only distributed systems and their properties. ---------- Everyone should know by now that Ripple is a company not a blockchain. And the XRPL is fully decentral with no authority at all. See XRPL.org

makomk 5y ago
Ripple is pretty much fully centralised last I checked - there's a list of nodes controlled by the company and a few other companies involved in setting it up which decide which version of transaction history is valid, and nodes outside that list have no say in their decisions. In theory you can use your own list of nodes, but it's a bad idea to ever do so. Since who you choose to trust has no effect on the Ripple-sanctioned set of transactions and you really don't want your version of history to ever diverge from theirs because then you'll disagree with everyone else on the planet about which transactions are valid, diverging from their chosen trusted list has only downsides.
- noxer 5y ago
  Did you read the post? Ripple is a company ofc its centralized. The XRPL is the "blockchain" and its NOT controlled by Ripple. They maintain the open source code that does not give any control over the running network at all. >Ripple-sanctioned set of transactions Thats a made up thing. There is not a single Tx that has ever been "sanctioned" on the XRPL Its also simply not possible. You are completely misinformed or intentionally spreading FUD. The time when Ripple ran the whole network is long gone.
fastball 5y ago
Does XRPL no longer have a unique node list that is mostly under the control of Ripple (because they maintain the default that clients automatically use)? https://cryptobriefing.com/is-xrp-decentralized-ripples-involvement-cryptocurrency/ https://cryptobriefing.com/is-xrp-decentralized-ripples-invo... Could the system still be decentralized in practice? Sure. But the fact that the Ripple CTO claimed XRP might be more decentralized than BTC or ETH makes me take the rest of their claims with huge buckets of salt.

baby 5y ago

> It is great to see effort being put into researching cleaner alternatives. Unfortunately, there is no working PoS-based system that does not rely on some degree of centralization in its security model. This is false. See Algorand, Cardano, Mina, etc. Proof-of-work is very much a technology of the past. It's the fossil fuel of cryptocurrencies.

tylercubell 5y ago
Additionally, Algorand has pledged [1] to be carbon-negative. [1]: https://www.algorand.com/resources/news/carbon_negative_announcement https://www.algorand.com/resources/news/carbon_negative_anno...
encryptluks2 5y ago
Algorand isn't currently decentralized. They have a list of approx 100 relays required for the network to function that they control tied to a centralized single domain.
- baby 5y ago
  Do you have a good source on that? This is not the first time I hear this. Btw I’ve studied the consensus protocol and it fulfills promises of decentralization so I’m wondering why they are using some single points of failure pieces (it is decentralized from a safety perspective: you can’t double spend, but it’s possible that some pieces are centralized). My guess is efficiency.
  - encryptluks2 5y ago
    https://algorand.foundation/faq https://algorand.foundation/faq Who manages the list of relay nodes? What about decentralization? > Currently, the Algorand Foundation manages the official list of relay nodes... > We are working on a model where the decisions on relay nodes will be done in a more decentralized way. As for the centralized domain, you can look it up in the source code but essentially it gets the list of relays from a SRV record on the algorand.network domain: _algobootstrap._tcp.mainnet.algorand.network

SubiculumCode 5y ago

Ethereum's move to proof of stake (in process now) should improve its carbon profile. Further, with the Polygon Commit Chain working with Ethereum, I believe that carbon emission will not be a major concern.

zeofig 5y ago

Largely meaningless numbers, because energy efficiency scales inversely (loosely speaking) with network size. You can do some nice tricks to improve efficiency, but the scaling will never be good, as these networks all use the same consensus algorithms. The only project I've seen with fundamentally superior scaling is Avalanche, but it's new technology and I'm not yet entirely convinced.

GhostVII 5y ago

Kind of a self-defeating list. As a PoW cryptocurrency becomes more popular, the value of a single coin goes up, so the mining reward will go up in terms of USD. As a result, the equilibrium energy usage in mining goes up proportionally to the increase in value. So if people start using a cryptocurrency because it is more efficient, it will stop being efficient.

jv0010 5y ago

Chia (XCH) coin would be interesting to see on that list seeing it basis was being an eco friendly crypto

Milkman128 5y ago
If you can account for the resources of each hard drive it kills
- agravier 5y ago
  Indeed, we should also account for such material resources allocated or wasted by all proof-of-some-resource crypto. Like the number of GPUS hoarded up by a non-ASIC PoW coin, or even the manufacturing of specialized miners.
- Taek 5y ago
  There's probably enough data out already on how long hard drives last while mining Chia to make a reasonable estimate. It kills hard drives fast enough that a large percentage of hard drives which were mining at genesis are now dead.
- c1sc0 5y ago
  There actually is an estimate of this floating in the chia Keybase channel. I remember it being very low, but there are many variables. Even at 100x the estimate it came down to less than 10 million USD in CO2 offsets.

JulianMorrison 5y ago

Isn't this basically 1 / popularity? I'm presuming other coins have the Bitcoin feature of getting harder as more powerful miners appear.

h4kor 5y ago
Basically, yes. There are minor improvements to be made to keep the reward for miners as low as possible. In the end the energy consumption comes down to burning energy proportional to the block reward. https://blog.libove.org/posts/the-cost-of-proof-of-work/ https://blog.libove.org/posts/the-cost-of-proof-of-work/

mudlus 5y ago

This chart is nice, but you need to include the difficulty of the algorithm (difficulty to attack), the size of the blockchain (hard for anyone except rich people to participate if you need a server farm just to verify a transaction), developer activity, and each coin should have a collapsable subset of “layer-2” options (eg. Lightning and liquid for Bitcoin), and their statistics as well. Most importantly, A “transaction” on a blockchain is not a “transaction” in the colloquial sense.

xur17 5y ago
I was going to comment on this as well - different coins made different decisions on how to scale their blockchains. Some have an expensive base chain with the intent of moving most transactions to layer 2. Some have a cheap layer 1 with lots of transactions. Some have a mix of the 2. There are different tradeoffs for each approach, but I'd love to see some of these scaling attempts included rather than just assuming that layer 1 transactions are the only ones that matter.

yayr 5y ago

There will be a time, where we have legislation to ban energy-inefficient crypto-currencies from being traded on regulated exchanges. This would make any proof of work currency essentially useless in the legislated areas. My bet is, EU will start, others will follow. This will lead to pressure to convert BTC, ETH etc. finally to proof of stake variants.

Pauldb8 5y ago

There is a lot of ignorance going around here. Bitcoin SV is cheaper because it can handle vastly more transactions per block, making it more efficient. Bitcoin SV believes in unrestricted scalability. Yes mostly this means miners will tend to agglomerate, and specialize I to big data center. Well know public entities that must follow law. but we believe all miners also have an incentive to not let any other gros past 50%. Today none is more than 38%, so we're safe. And also we have had big blocks with hundred of thousand of transaction. these block generate a lot of transaction fee, sometimes more than the mining reward ! Which we all know will decrease over time, to only rely on tx fee. Which BSV embraces. The node has been worked on to support Tera Node, with Tera Block, and billions of tx, the world of tomorrow, the enterprise grade blockchain. Yes indeed it's more environmental friendly to be more efficient.

onion-soup 5y ago
Why is this getting downvoted?
- impassionedrule 5y ago
  Because Bitcoin SV's potentially huge block size restricts who can actually run a node, making it very centralized
  - dudewhat1 5y ago
    look at BTC miners with 1mb blocks and its only a few big ones with majority of hash power. Its the inevitable 80/20

LAMike 5y ago

If anyone wants to learn about BSV, simply Google "Florida perjury Craig Wright"

oogabooga123 5y ago
Or search “Bitcoin SV”, what does celebrity gossip have to do with this
- ronsor 5y ago
  Craig Wright claims to be Satoshi and is the creator of Bitcoin SV.
  - baby 5y ago
    (And is basically a con artist)
nibunabu 5y ago
If anyone wants to learn about LAMike and other paid anti-bitcoin shills simply check this out, its a 5min read and worth your time https://thatsbtcnotbitcoin.com/ https://thatsbtcnotbitcoin.com/ "Today, most crypto exchanges, prominent competitor blockchains, coin market cap aggregators, crypto news outlets, etc. are owned by the same few companies who crippled BTC (Mastercard, Pedophile Epstein etc.), and you will never find unbiased information about BSV there or almost anywhere else either because it threatens their entire investment portfolio and they need all the money they can get so they can keep on raping children.

marsven_422 5y ago

Like "x% of crypto runs on green energy" this is a irrelevant argument. The energy could have been put to better uses.

swinglock 5y ago

It would be interesting to also be able to sort by how much value measured in USD or troy ounces the different networks secure.

wmf 5y ago
Are you talking about market cap or something else?

onion-soup 5y ago

Glad to see BSV finally getting noticed by HN

anon776 5y ago

Bitcoin cash and SV are low on the carbon emission cause they forked from BTC right? So they re-used bitcoins early work. Or am I totally wrong here?

onion-soup 5y ago
No, Because SV does not limit block size which allows tremendous throughput. Google block size war. >re-used bitcoins early work All forks share the same blockchain up until certain block.
- zhoujianfu 5y ago
  We’ll, for POW coins the “energy efficiency” falls directly out of the market cap divided by the number of transactions. BSV has essentially free transactions and not a high market cap, and so has a (suspiciously?) high txn count to price ratio.
  - onion-soup 5y ago
    No, txs are cheap because blocks are big enough to allow high throuoghput. BTC has 1 MB block so txs compete to get into next bloock.
baby 5y ago
Less users and smaller price => fewer miners
lawn 5y ago
No, they use less energy because their price is lower, but they're more efficient because they scale better than Bitcoin. (But BSV scales in an unhealthy manner.)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

everflow 5y ago

Get the signals or stay poor. Elon Musk said that BTC should increase the block. Who is the only person who has worked to increase the bitcoin block? obviously Dr Craig Steven Wright ... Current block is 638MB

everfree 5y ago
Worked? All he did was raise a number in the code. Bitcoin could have raised that number too, but they chose not to, because the higher the number is raised, the harder it is to verify the Bitcoin blockchain on consumer hardware.

kordlessagain 5y ago

What can 1 Mwhr do? > Drive an electric vehicle 3,600 miles.

everflow 5y ago

See yourself PoW currencies ranked by energy efficiency https://coincarboncap.com/ https://coincarboncap.com/

gruez 5y ago
Why are you re-linking the OP?

cft 5y ago

The most important thing to watch out for in this type of articles is for this push by certain anti-market interests to not succeed in a mining or even an outright Bitcoin ban in the West. They are using both environmental angle and an terrorist angle to justify a potential action, that can range from a new type of mining tax to an outright Bitcoin ban.

SirTen 5y ago

Why do they just ignore proof of stake mainstream coins like Cardano ADA, its super efficient, functional, and rewards holders. Musk is blind.

miked85 5y ago
Probably because the title/page explicitly says it is comparing PoW currencies.

takeda 5y ago

Total noob, but I'm wondering since generating the blockchain (at least with bitcoin) is about finding match (or should I say) partial match of a specific hash. Could that information be somehow used to cracking encryption that relies on cryptographic hashes?

lawn 5y ago
No, it gives you no information.

xx789 5y ago

So basically they're all bad except for SV? 1 Gallon of gas makes 2.4 kg emissions, so instead of swiping a card its burning a few gallons of gas, or 50 gallons for BTC.

baby 5y ago
Rather, they are all bad. Proof of stake cryptocurrencies is the state of the art in consensus protocols today, not proof of work. This is mostly a ranking of who’s the worst among the worse technologies.

Proven 5y ago

Yeah like anyone cares about that when investing or speculating

ordinaryradical 5y ago

PoW in conjunction with blockchain is anti-efficiency by design. It’s a principle of the ledger’s security and an inevitability that mature networks waste energy in exchange for that. Anyone serious about this topic needs to think beyond blockchain into fundamentally different technologies, like Nano, or things which forego decentralization entirely.

ArtTimeInvestor 5y ago

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/

mrb 5y ago

The "most efficient" cryptocurrencies on this list are the least secure, ie. the ones where double-spend attacks are the least expensive to conduct.

xtat 5y ago

Uhh, Bitcoin SV is super sketch though and this chart feels like a veiled shill for it.

illconnect 5y ago
What makes BSV super sketch?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

vldr 5y ago

It doesn't mention any PoS solution (which are, compared to PoW) extremely energy efficient. They do mention in the FAQ that they're not included since they still depend on some sort of centralization, but as far as I know this is not true for, for example, avalanche (https://avax.network https://avax.network) It's not really clear who is behind this site and if there's some hidden agenda. Let's assume not (but with crypto you can never be sure) and that they will properly consider PoS blockchains if they are as decentralized (or more) as the listed PoW chains.

jillesvangurp 5y ago
I think Ethereum 2.0 is currently demonstrating at scale that proof of stake works fine and can be secure against hordes of very incentivized hackers trying to cheat. That should hopefully bury the whole proof of stake is centralized argument. The notion of centralization has its roots in a different concept: permissioned vs. permissionless blockchains. Ethereum (1 and 2) and Bitcoin are both permissionless in the sense that anyone can become a node in the network and start earning gas. Ethereum 2.0 does not change that. You can still join and earn gas on it. Permissioned blockchains such as Stellar, Ripple and a few other networks are more closed. You can join the network but you don't have the same status as the core nodes in the network that are explicitly configured to trust each other. This makes e.g. 50% attacks from the outside impossible. E.g. Stellar works this way. You can become a stellar validator but nodes have to specify which other nodes they trust and that gives the first nodes a lot of power. In the case of Stellar there are only a few dozen validators run by organizations working with the Stellar foundation. Stellar has indicated that they want to gradually open up and eventually become permissionless. But as of yet they are too small to make that work and are relying a lot on a small set of validators run by just a handful of companies. There's a list of active nodes here: https://stellarbeat.io/nodes https://stellarbeat.io/nodes Such permissioned networks are great for e.g. banks that need to make sure they aren't doing transactions via some dodgy nodes in North Korea, Iran, etc. Technically, blockchains like this are not that different from public blockchains. There's nothing stopping these from opening up except that they choose not to. For a lot of businesses, that's a feature not a bug.
- 5y ago

glaive123 5y ago

If you want a list of PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by security and decentralization, just reverse the list.

sharperguy 5y ago

How did you include all the transactions made on the cryptocurrencies various lightning networks? I guess that could be quite hard to measure, since they aren't stored on the blockchain, although are equally valid transactions on the network.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

If the U.S. were to tax crypto to balance this harm, how would it best do so?

corona-research 5y ago

Many people on hackernews assume they are very smart and special while the truth is that they are brainwashed into praising slavery

spinny 5y ago

People that complain that PoW cryptos spend too much energy don't understand that it's just another form of conversion of energy, just like every other action human take. Average Joe has a manual labor, his physical energy is converted into labor, which converts to fiat currency. The food that Joe ate also require some amount of energy to grow and become Joe's food. PoW mining converts raw electric energy into a digitally transmissible currency

smt88 5y ago
You don't understand the point that you're arguing against. Producing fiat currency through manual labor uses a mix of renewable resources, and value is provided. You can't just dig in the ground and get paid for it. You have to do something that improves someone's business or life. Producing crypto is just turning coal (or whatever) into numbers. There is no intrinsic value created in that chain. If the crypto loses value, you may have even destroyed resources in the world for no reason. It's a net-negative.
- spinny 5y ago
  The cost of producing fiat currency is not the same for everybody. Producing crypto keeps a secure ledger, claiming it's just producing useless numbers is the same as claiming that a TLS session is just playing around with numbers. The value of fiat always goes to 0, resources have been destroyed in the world for no reason
  - smt88 5y ago
    If I pay someone to build me a house, I have a house and they have fiat. We converted energy into a house and fiat. If I convert the same amount of energy into crypto, I have nothing with intrinsic value. And before you say that fiat has no intrinsic value, consider that most people have fiat debt (loans, taxes, wages, etc.) that they can pay off with it. Currently very few people have any crypto debt.
    - spinny 5y ago

Geee 5y ago

PoW doesn't make transactions. The purpose is to secure the network. It's useful to compare this to the cost of attack: https://www.crypto51.app https://www.crypto51.app (this data is somewhat outdated) Also, this doesn't take off-chain transactions into account. There's way more actual financial transactions on Bitcoin when every L2 transaction is counted. Lightning network scales to billions of transactions per second, without adding PoW energy consumption.

illconnect 5y ago

I’m helping

prepend 5y ago

Are there any coins with a reasonable transaction cost? It seems shocking to me the USD-normalized cost per transaction given that the actual cost should be near zero. Visa/MC has a cost of like $.25+some percent so I suppose represents the cost of having a trusted oracle with fraud, review, etc. This seems like it should be the standard to beat for whether a currency can actually be used for anything normal and necessary to get wide uptake.

licnep 5y ago
Look at the website OP linked. The first one, Bitcoin SV, has a median transaction fee of just $0.0001 In fact it's being used in several projects where people send each other micropayments of just a couple cents, like twetch.app
- prepend 5y ago
  It’s good that it’s used in some places and hopefully will grow in acceptance for stuff like basic purchases.

TenthYoung 5y ago

Bitcoin SV is actually awesome. I'm honestly tempted to quit my job to build on it.

danielyaa5 5y ago

I wonder what the metrics are on a credit card transaction?

webinvest 5y ago

I’m not sure whether Stellar Lumens (XLM) counts as POW, POS or something else but it sure is energy efficient. It’s also the 3rd most popular cryptocurrency on Coinbase. https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellar/comments/nbqfey/since_co2_emissions_are_on_peoples_minds_right/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellar/comments/nbqfey/since_co2_e...