12 ms·

Ethereum Energy Consumption

74 points by pshc 4y ago

flipbrad 4y ago
Is it fanciful to hope this could - in and of itself - allow several polluting power stations to be decommissioned, and/or appreciably reduce energy prices for the rest of us?
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  A quick look at https://whattomine.com/ https://whattomine.com/ shows that several altcoins are within 70% profitability of mining Ethereum. That math is going to change as the Ethereum miners reconfigure for altcoins and the difficulties change, but the bottom line is that mining will continue as long as some coin is still profitable to mine.
  - pcthrowaway 4y ago
    I've read that a lot of former ETH miners have sold or are planning to sell their rigs (I think this is related to the submission yesterday about the GPU shortage being over[1], as Ethereum is usually mined on GPUs) We'll see if it plays out, but cryptocurrency prices falling have certainly reduced the energy consumption as well (it becomes less profitable to mine at a given difficulty when your mining reward is worth less). If Ethereum does eventually manage to overtake Bitcoin, that'll bode well for crypto's energy footprint in the long term (fingers crossed for this happening, or at least for there to not be another Bitcoin/PoW bubble) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31953662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31953662
  - xur17 4y ago
    But Ethereum mining rewards are orders of magnitude greater than the mining rewards for all of the altcoins (combined). The attack cost on this page [0] is a good reference for the relative mining incentive. Given this, a LOT of mining capacity is going to go offline when this occurs. [0] https://www.crypto51.app/ https://www.crypto51.app/
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago
    And altcoins are a lot riskier too. They tend to come and fall out of favour.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  It's not that significant in the grand scheme of things. Even if BTC disappeared, your electricity bill would not be noticeably cheaper.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    This is probably true. The first part of the GP's post (about unnecessary pollution) does apply however.
- everfree 4y ago
  Edit: Never mind, my calculations were definitely wrong.
  - patrickyeon 4y ago
    Not at all. 3.5 Billion kWh is 3.5 TWh.
  - elromulous 4y ago
    Something here it not computing. They said Ethereum energy consumption is similar to the Netherlands. This would mean a single coal planet can power the Netherlands 35 times over. Some numbers are definitely wrong here.
  - keishebmdod 4y ago
    3.5 billion kWh = 3.5 TWh, not 3500 TWh
  - jcranmer 4y ago
    Those numbers don't look right. A plant running at 90% uptime is ~8000 h/yr, and a typical large power plant produces 100s of MW. So you should be looking at a yearly output in ~1000s GWh/yr range.
  - notahacker 4y ago
    A terawatt is a trillion watts (or a billion kilowatts), so no, you're out by 3 orders of magnitude and Ethereum ceasing to use PoW would be the equivalent of losing the need for 30-40 typical coal power plants (or a handful of the world's largest coal power plants)
christiangenco 4y ago
I'm surprised to see Paypal only uses 0.26 TWh/yr (compared to Bitcoin's 200 TWh/yr and Ethereum's 112 TWh/yr) which includes their offices and data centers[1]. I've heard the argument that if you take into account all the human-associated energy costs Bitcoin's energy use compared to a company like Visa would be comparable. Now I'm not so sure. Notably this 0.26 TWh/yr number doesn't include things like the energy used by each human to drive to and from work or the amount of energy needed to make the food that fed them that year but now we're getting into some anti-human territory. Perhaps the goal shouldn't be to minimize energy use but to maximize energy output. 1. https://app.impaakt.com/analyses/paypal-consumed-264100-mwh-of-energy-in-2020-24-from-non-renewable-sources-27261 https://app.impaakt.com/analyses/paypal-consumed-264100-mwh-...
- toolz 4y ago
  It's not fair to just say [financial institutions power consumption] vs bitcoin as financial institutions do not protect their assets. Governments with militaries protect the fiat assets and the power consumption of a military strength necessary to stabilize a fiat currency might be substantial.
  - CamelCaseName 4y ago
    But, governments with militaries also protect crypto assets. Like when the DOJ went after Frosties founders, or more recently, SK and Do Kwon. There's also the CFTC and the SEC fighting over who will regulate the space. Even the most charitable argument, that crypto-relieved folks are trying to get governments involved.
    - toolz 4y ago
      Of course, that's why it's muddy on how you should compare the energy costs. Bitcoins energy costs are 99.9% related to protecting the asset, they are not related to the functionality of the system. Likewise financial systems have little to do with protecting fiat, banks are backed by governments businesses like paypal hold money in banks, etc. So to compare bitcoins energy consumption to an entity that spend energy in an unrelated way isn't entirely fair - there is some merit there, but not much.
MatthiasPortzel 4y ago
I think Ethereum is pretty cool, generally, but there are two downsides this post doesn’t address. The first is that there’s still no date for The Merge beyond “expected to happen in the second half of 2022.” Secondly, the Ethereum organization can only ask people nicely to stop mining the POW version of the coin. It’s possible that the current version of the Ethereum blockchain will continue to progress, like Ether Classic has, albeit at a greatly reduced value.
- pa7x1 4y ago
  There is still no date but it's getting really close. You can track the progress here: https://github.com/ethereum/pm/blob/master/Merge/mainnet-readiness.md https://github.com/ethereum/pm/blob/master/Merge/mainnet-rea... Notably, there is only 2 testnet merges left to do. Ethereum has 3 testnets to try things out. One testnet has already merge and is running on PoS (Ropsten testnet). The merge was a success although it allowed to uncover some minor issues. The next one, called Sepolia, is happening this week. After that, there is only one other testnet merge to occur, likely in August. If all that goes well a date will be set. Ethereum does have a way to force the death of PoW. The Ethereum protocol has always built-in the so-called "difficulty bomb". The difficulty bomb is simply a target date in the future when the mining difficulty starts rising exponentially. Making finding new blocks exponentially harder until the chain freezes to a halt. Its death is always coded-in, so to speak. The difficulty bomb needs to be delayed periodically so Ethereum can keep working. Last month the difficulty bomb was pushed a few months to occur in September. If all testing goes well, the merge will be triggered in September aligned with the difficulty bomb which will cause the death of PoW Ethereum. You could argue that you can always fork Ethereum, remove the difficulty bomb, and run that instead. Which is true. Except there won't be economic value in that chain, so there won't be fee revenues to capture which means it won't be profitable to point your hash-power to this forked chain.
yieldcrv 4y ago
Although validator earnings will be single digit percentages in ether per year, isn't that just the block reward, and all of the transaction fees are also split? With higher throughput, more strategies that once again saturate the block space, that could be more lucrative than it seems?
- Sargos 4y ago
  > Although validator earnings will be single digit percentages in ether per year, isn't that just the block reward, and all of the transaction fees are also split? Don't forget about MEV (maximum extractable value). Block producers can front run your trades and do other interesting stuff to about 6% extra a year using something like flashbots.
  - yieldcrv 4y ago
    How can I get MEV people to want to use my validator for the blocks they want to bribe in? I get how that works in Proof of Work, but not this form of Proof of Stake.
    - Sargos 4y ago
      When your validator is chosen to produce a block the client software asks flashbots for a list of transactions to include at the front of the block and you get paid for that. The validators produce blocks in a similar manner as miners do.
jonathan-adly 4y ago
Citing Digiconomist numbers is really undermining the credibility of this article. de Vries’s work has been debunked and shown to be garbage literally every time he publishes something (he is a low-level EU central banker, so not really a great authority). If you want to use something, this is much more credible from Cambridge University (showing radically different numbers): https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index For an example on what digiconmist gets wrong (there are many!): https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/not-science-digiconomist-bitcoin https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/not-science-digiconomis...
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  As I write this comment, the Digiconomist estimates for the Bitcoin network is 129.74 TWh The Cambridge University estimate for the Bitcoin network is 92.93 TWh with a lower bound of 51.01 TWh and an upper bound of 153.61 TWh. (I don't see an Ethereum comparison on the Cambridge site, so I can't check those numbers) Given that the Digiconomist estimate is within the bounds of the Cambridge estimate, I don't see how this is really a debunking. I'm not really inclined to put too much faith into an article from "Bitcoin Magazine" on the topic when a quick look at the numbers shows that the two primary sources don't really disagree and have similar estimates.
  - JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
    Give them their semantic difference, it’s all Bitcoin maxis have had to fight the absurd numbers for a while.
  - jonathan-adly 4y ago
    CNBC is better? https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/no-bitcoin-is-likely-not-going-to-consume-all-the-worlds-energy-in-2020.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/no-bitcoin-is-likely-not-goi...
    - lottin 4y ago
      I was expecting something a little more academic.
colesantiago 4y ago
Keep in mind this is all hypothetical and these numbers are not based in any reality. The foundation cites a random wordpress blog on these numbers. (really?) Even if this merge is done, a greener pyramid scheme doesn’t change anything about the speculators and scams that Ethereum harbours as Ethereum becomes even more centralised and plutocratic. Gas fee surges will always still be a problem after the merge which only favours the rich that can afford them making Ethereum useless at scale for on chain usecases.
woodruffw 4y ago
> Ethereum's energy consumption will be reduced by ~99.95% following The Merge from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS). After The Merge, Ethereum will use dramatically less carbon to be more secure. How many years has it been, at this point? I distinctly recall "imminent" plans to switch over to PoS as early as 2019.
- dabeeeenster 4y ago
  Why is this being downvoted?!
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    I'd also like to know. It's an honest question, and I don't see why we should evaluate Ethereum's power consumption based on an unrealized scheme that's been promised (and left undelivered) for years.
    - ChrisClark 4y ago
      Because the final steps are finally being performed. Just because something has taken a long time, doesn't mean it will never be done. There is nothing more to be done now except the actual final step of the merge. The latest test merges have gone very well, but when you're dealing with something this valuable, you do a lot of tests, just to be sure.
      - woodruffw 4y ago
        Okay. I can appreciate the need for caution and careful direction when making significant changes to a financial scheme. What I recall is a number of public announcements over the years claiming that the PoS transition was imminent, only to have it delayed at the last moment. That kind of repeated whiplash is not confidence inspiring, either from a design or a community standpoint. Is there a reason to expect this time to be different?
        deleted 4y ago
progrus 4y ago
I don’t trust proof of stake, mostly because loads of people who I consider irrational want it to work so desperately. Proof-of-work actually does work - it is no longer a debate, and these people (many of the same people who were saying “b-b-but tulips” a couple years ago) can’t stand it. I wouldn’t trust them to engineer their way out of a paper bag - definitely not after some muppet on the TV reminds them to get back in line. Capitalism is still winning again, folks. Deal with it.
- timeon 4y ago
  > Deal with it. Climate change is painting different picture.
  - progrus 4y ago
    Unfortunately, I will never go along with one of your plans, because I do not trust your ability, or the ability of others who panic about the environment. Bit of a Catch-22 for you there, sorry. It’s just reality.
    - runarberg 4y ago
      I’m not sure I follow your logic. Climate change is happening and rich players of capitalism are making record profits while being significant contributors of greenhouse gas emissions. The logic of whom not to trust in this chain is pretty simple. There is no catch-22 here without some magical stretch of logic.
      - progrus 4y ago
        Sorry, but no.
        runarberg 4y ago
        Do you care to explain your logic then? Why do you not trust the ability of those that claim climate change is an issue for capitalism? Despite climate change obviously happening with devastating consequences for most of humanity, and despite most major polluters raking in record profits? I mean my reason for not trusting said capitalists is that I don’t want people’s success to be vested in the destruction of our planet. I honestly don’t understand yours.
jimmysong 4y ago
Proof-of-Stake doesn't solve the Byzantine General's Problem. Therefore, the system no longer has the property of being able to get decentralized consensus
- ChrisClark 4y ago
  I think you're way too deep in the maximalist culture to actually see reality for what it is, Jimmy.
- jtsiskin 4y ago
  Please elaborate. What makes you think it does not?
jakear 4y ago
What a magnificent joke that their “The Merge” link 404’s.
GekkePrutser 4y ago
But when is this merge happening? There is still no date as far as I can see? It's been happening "soon" for years now :( I really hope it takes off though, because if crypto is here to stay it really should stop wasting so much energy. We'll never solve the climate crisis this way.
- JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
  https://Wenmerge.com https://Wenmerge.com
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago
    Ah interesting.. So "the merge" is pending some kind of blockchain activity? Like an X number of blocks mined? I thought it was just an arbitrary decision saying "We'll merge on date X".
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
kkielhofner 4y ago
It’s amazing to compare the energy consumption of a network where the all time high of total worldwide transactions in a 24 hour period is 1.7 million. Compared to the entire energy consumption of a country (Netherlands) with a population of 18 million people. Just incredible.
- mattwilsonn888 4y ago
  Tx count is less important than tx volume, which, for practical purposes, is arbitrarily large in the case of Bitcoin.
  - kkielhofner 4y ago
    I’m trying to understand the difference and how it could change the conclusion/sentiment? Not trying to be snarky, just generally intrigued.
    - dataangel 4y ago
      1 transaction can transfer 1 billion dollars worth of Bitcoin. The number of transactions is what is limited, not how many coins can be moved. I disagree with parent though, they're both important.
Dzugaru 4y ago
> Ethereum will use dramatically less carbon to be more secure Why is that? PoS security model is fundamentally different from PoW - for instance - you cannot determine which of the two chains is "correct" anymore, you have to consult "a friend" [0]. That's not the case in Bitcoin, where the correct chain is simply the longest. All PoS algos are very complex and have a ton of seemingly bandaid solutions for various problems that arise when you can create alternate histories freely (even if you use VDFs I think), and there is a disturbing lack of critique on that. So, why is it seen as "more secure"? [0] https://yanmaani.github.io/proof-of-stake-is-a-scam-and-the-people-promoting-it-are-scammers/ https://yanmaani.github.io/proof-of-stake-is-a-scam-and-the-...
- DennisP 4y ago
  If the most-difficult chain wins, period, then Bitcoin is completely controlled by the miners. Nobody else has any say over consensus rules, and even if the miners violated the rules to mint themselves extra money, they would still have the "correct chain" if it had the most accumulated hashpower. If the correct chain is actually the most difficult chain that follows the accepted rules, then you're still checking with a friend to find out what software implements the correct rules. Most bitcoin people tell me the latter is the actual case, which means there's a level of social consensus for PoW as well as PoS.
  - Geee 4y ago
    There's multiple levels of consensus. Chain consensus is what determines the correct chain, given the current rules. Miners work under these rules. Consensus on which rules to use happens on a different level. I'd say that it's economic consensus enforced by network participants. There's economic incentive to use rules which will not split the network.
    - DennisP 4y ago
      Right, so you're telling me it's the latter case. That means you can't tell what the correct chain is just by counting hashes. You have to ask someone what the currently correct software is, and then you can find the correct chain for that software. This puts you in the same position as someone on a proof-of-stake chain.
Glench 4y ago
I understand Proof of Stake to be much more centralized and prone to takeovers than proof of work. So if the merge ever actually happens, it would fix the energy consumption issue at the trade-off of security (staking, aka rich get richer). I'm much more bullish on Chia and proof-of-space/time — same nakamato consensus as proof-of-work without the energy consumption: https://chiapower.org/ https://chiapower.org/ Also helps that Chia can be farmed from a raspberry pi or similarly low-performance device, making it so there are over 100k farmers around the world currently.
- nootropicat 4y ago
  >I understand Proof of Stake to be much more centralized and prone to takeovers than proof of work. So if the merge ever actually happens, it would fix the energy consumption issue at the trade-off of security (staking, aka rich get richer). The opposite is true, proof of work is hopelessly insecure and centralized. It's hopelessly insecure because resources needed to mine are external - so any attack by the only realistic adversary (ie. a state) is always just a question of resources, and the most pessimistic cost is in low billions of dollars. Realistically - America could already 51% bitcoin by forcing regulations on existing miners for nearly zero cost. It's also centralized because mining has infinite economies of scale. Bitcoin mining started with hobbyists mining on home pcs, now there are companies buying power plants just to mine. This only makes it easier for governments to control. The only reason no big PoW coins were successfully attacked is because there's no clear motivation for anyone - nothing in the real world relies on any cryptocurrency to continue existing. The only realistic attack would be to try to exchange tokens on the attacked PoW network for tokens on another - which is easily done for low 9 figs, but becomes increasingly hard afterwards - making any attack uneconomical. On top of that there are legal issues - it's very possible a 51% double spending attack would be legally treated as theft. This all changes completely the moment major countries and corporations go down if some blockchain goes down. Imagine Iran defaulting if bitcoin or ethereum gets taken over in a 51% PoW attack, with all transactions from Iran addresses censored. It would be orders of magnitudes cheaper than any serious military action. Fortunately for Iran and crypto holders that's not true. A significant adoption of a PoW network would end up in an inevitable disaster and potentially destroy any trust in cryptocurrencies forever. Of all invented consensus methods only proof of stake can survive in a truly hostile environment. No government can print eth at will to take over ethereum, and stakers can easily stay anonymous, unlike massive corporate miners. Bitcoin holders are very good at propaganda and pretending PoW is safe, which works as marketing, but wouldn't do anything against a real military incentive to take control over bitcoin. >I'm much more bullish on Chia and proof-of-space/time No, Chia has the same issue. Anything that relies on external resources as consensus votes is fundamentally insecure.
nootropicat 4y ago
Energy use can be computed from first principles given some arbitrary assumptions: average power per node and number of nodes. There are ARM nodes that require less than 10W. Then there are more conventional servers that require ...150W? Average here is pure guesswork, but error bounds aren't that large - let's say 100W/node. How many nodes are going to exist - I think 10k is a reasonable maximum number. The result is 24000kWh per day. At $0.15/kWh, that means $3600 in daily energy costs. There's also the hardware cost itself and internet connection cost (which can be zero if there's an already paid for connection) - but all in all, total, real expenses to run ethereum become a rounding error of current ones. Guesstimating hw depreciation and connection cost, daily total at $5k translates into $1.825M/year. The value of block rewards during the last 24h is ~$15M. In other words resources required for running ethereum for ~3 hours now are going to be enough to run it for a year after the merge.
outside1234 4y ago
Been promising this for years with no results
outside1234 4y ago
The conclusion I take away from their charts is that we should use PayPal?
Geee 4y ago
This doesn't really explain why energy is needed in a blockchain. Every block contains a verifiable proof that energy has been used to mine the block. Given the properties of the algorithm and physical reality, it is also a verifiable proof that certain amount of time has passed. This proof is what enables all participants to verify that the longest chain is the correct one. Proof-of-work isn't used just to add cost, but to make sure that the longest chain has longest history in physical time, and make it objectively verifiable. Proof-of-stake doesn't have this property. Whole history can be recreated in a microsecond, and there's no way to tell by looking at the blockchain. Instead, network participants have to ask others for the correct chain, or refer to a trusted source when there are disputes.
- dlubarov 4y ago
  I would argue that PoW participants still need to "ask others", albeit for different kinds of information - - For starters, if say I'm accepting a BTC payment, I need to ask a trusted source about the market value of BTC. - I need to ask which software I can trust to implement the Bitcoin protocol. - If I don't want to verify every transaction from the genesis, I need to ask for a checkpoint. - In case I'm being eclipsed, I need to ask whether the chain I'm seeing is the canonical one, or what approximate hash rate the canonical chain should have.
  - Geee 4y ago
    Those things have a single truth, on which social consensus converges on. PoS doesn't have this single truth, and thus it's incapable of converging on it. "call a friend"-consensus fails when there are disputes.
Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
It's good to know that soon it will take less energy for people to lose money on crypto.

74 points by pshc 4y ago

Is it fanciful to hope this could - in and of itself - allow several polluting power stations to be decommissioned, and/or appreciably reduce energy prices for the rest of us?

PragmaticPulp 4y ago
A quick look at https://whattomine.com/ https://whattomine.com/ shows that several altcoins are within 70% profitability of mining Ethereum. That math is going to change as the Ethereum miners reconfigure for altcoins and the difficulties change, but the bottom line is that mining will continue as long as some coin is still profitable to mine.
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  I've read that a lot of former ETH miners have sold or are planning to sell their rigs (I think this is related to the submission yesterday about the GPU shortage being over[1], as Ethereum is usually mined on GPUs) We'll see if it plays out, but cryptocurrency prices falling have certainly reduced the energy consumption as well (it becomes less profitable to mine at a given difficulty when your mining reward is worth less). If Ethereum does eventually manage to overtake Bitcoin, that'll bode well for crypto's energy footprint in the long term (fingers crossed for this happening, or at least for there to not be another Bitcoin/PoW bubble) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31953662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31953662
- xur17 4y ago
  But Ethereum mining rewards are orders of magnitude greater than the mining rewards for all of the altcoins (combined). The attack cost on this page [0] is a good reference for the relative mining incentive. Given this, a LOT of mining capacity is going to go offline when this occurs. [0] https://www.crypto51.app/ https://www.crypto51.app/
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  And altcoins are a lot riskier too. They tend to come and fall out of favour.
chrisco255 4y ago
It's not that significant in the grand scheme of things. Even if BTC disappeared, your electricity bill would not be noticeably cheaper.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  This is probably true. The first part of the GP's post (about unnecessary pollution) does apply however.
everfree 4y ago
Edit: Never mind, my calculations were definitely wrong.
- patrickyeon 4y ago
  Not at all. 3.5 Billion kWh is 3.5 TWh.
- elromulous 4y ago
  Something here it not computing. They said Ethereum energy consumption is similar to the Netherlands. This would mean a single coal planet can power the Netherlands 35 times over. Some numbers are definitely wrong here.
- keishebmdod 4y ago
  3.5 billion kWh = 3.5 TWh, not 3500 TWh
- jcranmer 4y ago
  Those numbers don't look right. A plant running at 90% uptime is ~8000 h/yr, and a typical large power plant produces 100s of MW. So you should be looking at a yearly output in ~1000s GWh/yr range.
- notahacker 4y ago
  A terawatt is a trillion watts (or a billion kilowatts), so no, you're out by 3 orders of magnitude and Ethereum ceasing to use PoW would be the equivalent of losing the need for 30-40 typical coal power plants (or a handful of the world's largest coal power plants)

christiangenco 4y ago

I'm surprised to see Paypal only uses 0.26 TWh/yr (compared to Bitcoin's 200 TWh/yr and Ethereum's 112 TWh/yr) which includes their offices and data centers[1]. I've heard the argument that if you take into account all the human-associated energy costs Bitcoin's energy use compared to a company like Visa would be comparable. Now I'm not so sure. Notably this 0.26 TWh/yr number doesn't include things like the energy used by each human to drive to and from work or the amount of energy needed to make the food that fed them that year but now we're getting into some anti-human territory. Perhaps the goal shouldn't be to minimize energy use but to maximize energy output. 1. https://app.impaakt.com/analyses/paypal-consumed-264100-mwh-of-energy-in-2020-24-from-non-renewable-sources-27261 https://app.impaakt.com/analyses/paypal-consumed-264100-mwh-...

toolz 4y ago
It's not fair to just say [financial institutions power consumption] vs bitcoin as financial institutions do not protect their assets. Governments with militaries protect the fiat assets and the power consumption of a military strength necessary to stabilize a fiat currency might be substantial.
- CamelCaseName 4y ago
  But, governments with militaries also protect crypto assets. Like when the DOJ went after Frosties founders, or more recently, SK and Do Kwon. There's also the CFTC and the SEC fighting over who will regulate the space. Even the most charitable argument, that crypto-relieved folks are trying to get governments involved.
  - toolz 4y ago
    Of course, that's why it's muddy on how you should compare the energy costs. Bitcoins energy costs are 99.9% related to protecting the asset, they are not related to the functionality of the system. Likewise financial systems have little to do with protecting fiat, banks are backed by governments businesses like paypal hold money in banks, etc. So to compare bitcoins energy consumption to an entity that spend energy in an unrelated way isn't entirely fair - there is some merit there, but not much.

MatthiasPortzel 4y ago

I think Ethereum is pretty cool, generally, but there are two downsides this post doesn’t address. The first is that there’s still no date for The Merge beyond “expected to happen in the second half of 2022.” Secondly, the Ethereum organization can only ask people nicely to stop mining the POW version of the coin. It’s possible that the current version of the Ethereum blockchain will continue to progress, like Ether Classic has, albeit at a greatly reduced value.

pa7x1 4y ago
There is still no date but it's getting really close. You can track the progress here: https://github.com/ethereum/pm/blob/master/Merge/mainnet-readiness.md https://github.com/ethereum/pm/blob/master/Merge/mainnet-rea... Notably, there is only 2 testnet merges left to do. Ethereum has 3 testnets to try things out. One testnet has already merge and is running on PoS (Ropsten testnet). The merge was a success although it allowed to uncover some minor issues. The next one, called Sepolia, is happening this week. After that, there is only one other testnet merge to occur, likely in August. If all that goes well a date will be set. Ethereum does have a way to force the death of PoW. The Ethereum protocol has always built-in the so-called "difficulty bomb". The difficulty bomb is simply a target date in the future when the mining difficulty starts rising exponentially. Making finding new blocks exponentially harder until the chain freezes to a halt. Its death is always coded-in, so to speak. The difficulty bomb needs to be delayed periodically so Ethereum can keep working. Last month the difficulty bomb was pushed a few months to occur in September. If all testing goes well, the merge will be triggered in September aligned with the difficulty bomb which will cause the death of PoW Ethereum. You could argue that you can always fork Ethereum, remove the difficulty bomb, and run that instead. Which is true. Except there won't be economic value in that chain, so there won't be fee revenues to capture which means it won't be profitable to point your hash-power to this forked chain.

yieldcrv 4y ago

Although validator earnings will be single digit percentages in ether per year, isn't that just the block reward, and all of the transaction fees are also split? With higher throughput, more strategies that once again saturate the block space, that could be more lucrative than it seems?

Sargos 4y ago
> Although validator earnings will be single digit percentages in ether per year, isn't that just the block reward, and all of the transaction fees are also split? Don't forget about MEV (maximum extractable value). Block producers can front run your trades and do other interesting stuff to about 6% extra a year using something like flashbots.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  How can I get MEV people to want to use my validator for the blocks they want to bribe in? I get how that works in Proof of Work, but not this form of Proof of Stake.
  - Sargos 4y ago
    When your validator is chosen to produce a block the client software asks flashbots for a list of transactions to include at the front of the block and you get paid for that. The validators produce blocks in a similar manner as miners do.

jonathan-adly 4y ago

Citing Digiconomist numbers is really undermining the credibility of this article. de Vries’s work has been debunked and shown to be garbage literally every time he publishes something (he is a low-level EU central banker, so not really a great authority). If you want to use something, this is much more credible from Cambridge University (showing radically different numbers): https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index For an example on what digiconmist gets wrong (there are many!): https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/not-science-digiconomist-bitcoin https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/not-science-digiconomis...

PragmaticPulp 4y ago
As I write this comment, the Digiconomist estimates for the Bitcoin network is 129.74 TWh The Cambridge University estimate for the Bitcoin network is 92.93 TWh with a lower bound of 51.01 TWh and an upper bound of 153.61 TWh. (I don't see an Ethereum comparison on the Cambridge site, so I can't check those numbers) Given that the Digiconomist estimate is within the bounds of the Cambridge estimate, I don't see how this is really a debunking. I'm not really inclined to put too much faith into an article from "Bitcoin Magazine" on the topic when a quick look at the numbers shows that the two primary sources don't really disagree and have similar estimates.
- JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
  Give them their semantic difference, it’s all Bitcoin maxis have had to fight the absurd numbers for a while.
- jonathan-adly 4y ago
  CNBC is better? https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/no-bitcoin-is-likely-not-going-to-consume-all-the-worlds-energy-in-2020.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/no-bitcoin-is-likely-not-goi...
  - lottin 4y ago
    I was expecting something a little more academic.

colesantiago 4y ago

Keep in mind this is all hypothetical and these numbers are not based in any reality. The foundation cites a random wordpress blog on these numbers. (really?) Even if this merge is done, a greener pyramid scheme doesn’t change anything about the speculators and scams that Ethereum harbours as Ethereum becomes even more centralised and plutocratic. Gas fee surges will always still be a problem after the merge which only favours the rich that can afford them making Ethereum useless at scale for on chain usecases.

woodruffw 4y ago

> Ethereum's energy consumption will be reduced by ~99.95% following The Merge from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS). After The Merge, Ethereum will use dramatically less carbon to be more secure. How many years has it been, at this point? I distinctly recall "imminent" plans to switch over to PoS as early as 2019.

dabeeeenster 4y ago
Why is this being downvoted?!
- woodruffw 4y ago
  I'd also like to know. It's an honest question, and I don't see why we should evaluate Ethereum's power consumption based on an unrealized scheme that's been promised (and left undelivered) for years.
  - ChrisClark 4y ago
    Because the final steps are finally being performed. Just because something has taken a long time, doesn't mean it will never be done. There is nothing more to be done now except the actual final step of the merge. The latest test merges have gone very well, but when you're dealing with something this valuable, you do a lot of tests, just to be sure.
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      Okay. I can appreciate the need for caution and careful direction when making significant changes to a financial scheme. What I recall is a number of public announcements over the years claiming that the PoS transition was imminent, only to have it delayed at the last moment. That kind of repeated whiplash is not confidence inspiring, either from a design or a community standpoint. Is there a reason to expect this time to be different?
      - deleted 4y ago

progrus 4y ago

I don’t trust proof of stake, mostly because loads of people who I consider irrational want it to work so desperately. Proof-of-work actually does work - it is no longer a debate, and these people (many of the same people who were saying “b-b-but tulips” a couple years ago) can’t stand it. I wouldn’t trust them to engineer their way out of a paper bag - definitely not after some muppet on the TV reminds them to get back in line. Capitalism is still winning again, folks. Deal with it.

timeon 4y ago
> Deal with it. Climate change is painting different picture.
- progrus 4y ago
  Unfortunately, I will never go along with one of your plans, because I do not trust your ability, or the ability of others who panic about the environment. Bit of a Catch-22 for you there, sorry. It’s just reality.
  - runarberg 4y ago
    I’m not sure I follow your logic. Climate change is happening and rich players of capitalism are making record profits while being significant contributors of greenhouse gas emissions. The logic of whom not to trust in this chain is pretty simple. There is no catch-22 here without some magical stretch of logic.
    - progrus 4y ago
      Sorry, but no.
      - runarberg 4y ago
        Do you care to explain your logic then? Why do you not trust the ability of those that claim climate change is an issue for capitalism? Despite climate change obviously happening with devastating consequences for most of humanity, and despite most major polluters raking in record profits? I mean my reason for not trusting said capitalists is that I don’t want people’s success to be vested in the destruction of our planet. I honestly don’t understand yours.

jimmysong 4y ago

Proof-of-Stake doesn't solve the Byzantine General's Problem. Therefore, the system no longer has the property of being able to get decentralized consensus

ChrisClark 4y ago
I think you're way too deep in the maximalist culture to actually see reality for what it is, Jimmy.
jtsiskin 4y ago
Please elaborate. What makes you think it does not?

jakear 4y ago

What a magnificent joke that their “The Merge” link 404’s.

GekkePrutser 4y ago

But when is this merge happening? There is still no date as far as I can see? It's been happening "soon" for years now :( I really hope it takes off though, because if crypto is here to stay it really should stop wasting so much energy. We'll never solve the climate crisis this way.

JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
https://Wenmerge.com https://Wenmerge.com
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  Ah interesting.. So "the merge" is pending some kind of blockchain activity? Like an X number of blocks mined? I thought it was just an arbitrary decision saying "We'll merge on date X".
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

kkielhofner 4y ago

It’s amazing to compare the energy consumption of a network where the all time high of total worldwide transactions in a 24 hour period is 1.7 million. Compared to the entire energy consumption of a country (Netherlands) with a population of 18 million people. Just incredible.

mattwilsonn888 4y ago
Tx count is less important than tx volume, which, for practical purposes, is arbitrarily large in the case of Bitcoin.
- kkielhofner 4y ago
  I’m trying to understand the difference and how it could change the conclusion/sentiment? Not trying to be snarky, just generally intrigued.
  - dataangel 4y ago
    1 transaction can transfer 1 billion dollars worth of Bitcoin. The number of transactions is what is limited, not how many coins can be moved. I disagree with parent though, they're both important.

Dzugaru 4y ago

> Ethereum will use dramatically less carbon to be more secure Why is that? PoS security model is fundamentally different from PoW - for instance - you cannot determine which of the two chains is "correct" anymore, you have to consult "a friend" [0]. That's not the case in Bitcoin, where the correct chain is simply the longest. All PoS algos are very complex and have a ton of seemingly bandaid solutions for various problems that arise when you can create alternate histories freely (even if you use VDFs I think), and there is a disturbing lack of critique on that. So, why is it seen as "more secure"? [0] https://yanmaani.github.io/proof-of-stake-is-a-scam-and-the-people-promoting-it-are-scammers/ https://yanmaani.github.io/proof-of-stake-is-a-scam-and-the-...

DennisP 4y ago
If the most-difficult chain wins, period, then Bitcoin is completely controlled by the miners. Nobody else has any say over consensus rules, and even if the miners violated the rules to mint themselves extra money, they would still have the "correct chain" if it had the most accumulated hashpower. If the correct chain is actually the most difficult chain that follows the accepted rules, then you're still checking with a friend to find out what software implements the correct rules. Most bitcoin people tell me the latter is the actual case, which means there's a level of social consensus for PoW as well as PoS.
- Geee 4y ago
  There's multiple levels of consensus. Chain consensus is what determines the correct chain, given the current rules. Miners work under these rules. Consensus on which rules to use happens on a different level. I'd say that it's economic consensus enforced by network participants. There's economic incentive to use rules which will not split the network.
  - DennisP 4y ago
    Right, so you're telling me it's the latter case. That means you can't tell what the correct chain is just by counting hashes. You have to ask someone what the currently correct software is, and then you can find the correct chain for that software. This puts you in the same position as someone on a proof-of-stake chain.

Glench 4y ago

I understand Proof of Stake to be much more centralized and prone to takeovers than proof of work. So if the merge ever actually happens, it would fix the energy consumption issue at the trade-off of security (staking, aka rich get richer). I'm much more bullish on Chia and proof-of-space/time — same nakamato consensus as proof-of-work without the energy consumption: https://chiapower.org/ https://chiapower.org/ Also helps that Chia can be farmed from a raspberry pi or similarly low-performance device, making it so there are over 100k farmers around the world currently.

nootropicat 4y ago
>I understand Proof of Stake to be much more centralized and prone to takeovers than proof of work. So if the merge ever actually happens, it would fix the energy consumption issue at the trade-off of security (staking, aka rich get richer). The opposite is true, proof of work is hopelessly insecure and centralized. It's hopelessly insecure because resources needed to mine are external - so any attack by the only realistic adversary (ie. a state) is always just a question of resources, and the most pessimistic cost is in low billions of dollars. Realistically - America could already 51% bitcoin by forcing regulations on existing miners for nearly zero cost. It's also centralized because mining has infinite economies of scale. Bitcoin mining started with hobbyists mining on home pcs, now there are companies buying power plants just to mine. This only makes it easier for governments to control. The only reason no big PoW coins were successfully attacked is because there's no clear motivation for anyone - nothing in the real world relies on any cryptocurrency to continue existing. The only realistic attack would be to try to exchange tokens on the attacked PoW network for tokens on another - which is easily done for low 9 figs, but becomes increasingly hard afterwards - making any attack uneconomical. On top of that there are legal issues - it's very possible a 51% double spending attack would be legally treated as theft. This all changes completely the moment major countries and corporations go down if some blockchain goes down. Imagine Iran defaulting if bitcoin or ethereum gets taken over in a 51% PoW attack, with all transactions from Iran addresses censored. It would be orders of magnitudes cheaper than any serious military action. Fortunately for Iran and crypto holders that's not true. A significant adoption of a PoW network would end up in an inevitable disaster and potentially destroy any trust in cryptocurrencies forever. Of all invented consensus methods only proof of stake can survive in a truly hostile environment. No government can print eth at will to take over ethereum, and stakers can easily stay anonymous, unlike massive corporate miners. Bitcoin holders are very good at propaganda and pretending PoW is safe, which works as marketing, but wouldn't do anything against a real military incentive to take control over bitcoin. >I'm much more bullish on Chia and proof-of-space/time No, Chia has the same issue. Anything that relies on external resources as consensus votes is fundamentally insecure.

nootropicat 4y ago

Energy use can be computed from first principles given some arbitrary assumptions: average power per node and number of nodes. There are ARM nodes that require less than 10W. Then there are more conventional servers that require ...150W? Average here is pure guesswork, but error bounds aren't that large - let's say 100W/node. How many nodes are going to exist - I think 10k is a reasonable maximum number. The result is 24000kWh per day. At $0.15/kWh, that means $3600 in daily energy costs. There's also the hardware cost itself and internet connection cost (which can be zero if there's an already paid for connection) - but all in all, total, real expenses to run ethereum become a rounding error of current ones. Guesstimating hw depreciation and connection cost, daily total at $5k translates into $1.825M/year. The value of block rewards during the last 24h is ~$15M. In other words resources required for running ethereum for ~3 hours now are going to be enough to run it for a year after the merge.

outside1234 4y ago

Been promising this for years with no results

outside1234 4y ago

The conclusion I take away from their charts is that we should use PayPal?

Geee 4y ago

This doesn't really explain why energy is needed in a blockchain. Every block contains a verifiable proof that energy has been used to mine the block. Given the properties of the algorithm and physical reality, it is also a verifiable proof that certain amount of time has passed. This proof is what enables all participants to verify that the longest chain is the correct one. Proof-of-work isn't used just to add cost, but to make sure that the longest chain has longest history in physical time, and make it objectively verifiable. Proof-of-stake doesn't have this property. Whole history can be recreated in a microsecond, and there's no way to tell by looking at the blockchain. Instead, network participants have to ask others for the correct chain, or refer to a trusted source when there are disputes.

dlubarov 4y ago
I would argue that PoW participants still need to "ask others", albeit for different kinds of information - - For starters, if say I'm accepting a BTC payment, I need to ask a trusted source about the market value of BTC. - I need to ask which software I can trust to implement the Bitcoin protocol. - If I don't want to verify every transaction from the genesis, I need to ask for a checkpoint. - In case I'm being eclipsed, I need to ask whether the chain I'm seeing is the canonical one, or what approximate hash rate the canonical chain should have.
- Geee 4y ago
  Those things have a single truth, on which social consensus converges on. PoS doesn't have this single truth, and thus it's incapable of converging on it. "call a friend"-consensus fails when there are disputes.

Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago

It's good to know that soon it will take less energy for people to lose money on crypto.