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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 Eth

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.

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.