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It worked. And it reduces the world's energy bill by 0.5%: https://twitter.com/JonathanBeuys/status/1570305323629527046 https://twitter.com/JonathanBeuys/stat
by JonathanBeuys 4y ago
It worked.
And it reduces the world's energy bill by 0.5%:
https://twitter.com/JonathanBeuys/status/1570305323629527046 https://twitter.com/JonathanBeuys/status/1570305323629527046
I feel a great disturbance in the force. As if a million miners cried out all at once and then were suddenly silenced.
- scambier 4y agoWait, the Ethereum blockchain alone was consuming 0.5% of the world's total energy?
- isoprophlex 4y agoCompletely indefensible in a world beset with global warming and energy shortages
- Barrin92 4y agousual comparison was that the energy consumption is comparable to nations like the Netherlands or Finland, so seems about right.
- ollifi 4y agoThere is lot of talk and debate about building wind, nuclear doing the green transition etc. in Finland. I guess like in every country. Somehow it makes me sad that group of open source developers could do more today than we ever can to help the planet no matter how much we scale back. Although they built the hell machine in the first place, so maybe better if they would not have ever done anything.
- OJFord 4y agoWell, in that perspective 'green production' seems like the right thing to be talking about (vs. cutting usage, say) - if you over-produce you can always export, selling 'green' energy to a country that might otherwise have been buying 'brown'.
- mailbag 4y ago0.5% of the world’s electricity.
- mrpopo 4y agoTotal electricity*. Which is still huge, I am not sure people realize that there are no more low-hanging fruits in the form of a technical feat that a small group of people can accomplish like this, without impacting people's lives.
- shafyy 4y agoIt's weird to celebrate the electricity savings of Ethereum like this. It's good that it's less energy-intensive now, but it was that energy-intensive before because of Ethereum in the first place.
- whatisweb3 4y agoThis is how all tech works - trains, cars, power stations. We build things that are initially inefficient. We eventually transition to energy efficient tech. We celebrate. It’s rare the transition can reduce 99.95% of energy footprint the size of a country within a minute of activating the new tech.
- Mordisquitos 4y agoThe difference is that PoW is not "inefficient". Rather, it is intrinsically wasteful by its very nature. Take an inefficient car for instance. There are diminishing returns in its utility after a certain point of energy use. On the other hand, there are no diminishing returns in PoW. The more energy you use, the more money you make.
- whatisweb3 4y agoSure? It was both an inefficient and wasteful mechanism to secure consensus. This is why developers have been actively researching and developing how to switch Eth to PoS for years.
- deadfish 4y agoAn electric heater runs current through a wire .. the waste product of doing so is heat. The more you 'waste' the more heat produced. I guess the more efficient version of the same thing would be the move to using heat pumps.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- worldsayshi 4y agoI wonder if there is some very surprised power plant technicians out there right now scratching their heads because they didn't get the memo.
- sph 4y agoWait until you hear how much of the world's total energy is wasted on ads (manufacturing, transmission, power usage) or spam email.
- kaba0 4y agoWhile I hate ads with a burning passion, they do affect multiple orders of more people than cryptos ever did, even if that effect is far from positive (but not blanket negative either).
- dmitriid 4y agoThat's a good company for cryptocurrencies to be in, don't you think? Just as wasteful and useless.
- scambier 4y ago- "X is extremely wasteful" - "Wait until you hear how much Y is more wasteful" Ok?
- capableweb 4y ago> I feel a great disturbance in the force. As if a million miners cried out all at once and then were suddenly silenced. You might want to adjust your force sensitivity. The merge doesn't simply GPU mining will stop, simply that the PoS chain is now merged with the PoW chain. You'll still be able to PoW mine with your GPU until they remove PoW fully, which is due to happen sometime around Q3 2022.
- bsamuels 4y agowhat you're referring to is an earlier way the merge was designed. there is no PoW mining anymore.
- capableweb 4y agoIf that's the case, I stand correctly. Seems my understanding of the merge was an outdated one then. Thanks for the correction.
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoWe are already very close to Q3 2022. Unless you meant another year.
- soco 4y agoIsn't September even Q4?
- wumms 4y agoQ1: January, February, March Q2: April, May, June Q3: July, August, September Q4: October, November, December Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_year
- robjan 4y agoDepends on which country you are in. Many countries financial years run April to April.
- maxioatic 4y agoDuring the livestream of the Merge someone said 0.2%, while Bitcoin was at 0.5%. Regardless, still an amazingly high percentage to just “turn off”.
- JonathanBeuys 4y agoWell, I laid out my numbers and calculation. If there is a more accurate way of calculating it that results in 0.2%, I would love to hear about it.
- mratsim 4y agohttps://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/ https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/ - Youtube 244 TWh/year - Gold mining 240 TWh/year - Bitcoin 200 TWh/year - Ethereum PoW 112 TWh / year - Netflix 94 TWh / year - Gaming 34 TWh / year - Paypal 0.26 TWh / year - Ethereum PoS 0.01 TWh / year
- alexmingoia 4y agoWe'll still use that 0.5% for something else, right? It's not as if power generation (and emissions) will be reduced.
- chinathrow 4y agoSome power generation is done by demand, e.g. coal plants are fired when there is demand or turned off when there is low demand. Same with e.g. pumped hydro and other sources.
- capableweb 4y agoEnergy generation changes depending on energy usage. The grids around the world are highly flexible (in relative terms) so when energy usage goes down, less energy is produced and vice-versa.
- Jolter 4y agoNo, what happens is that the price per kWh drops. The only way production drops is if that takes the price below the point of profitability.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- daemin 4y agoElectricity production at any point in time must match electricity consumption, that's literally how the electricity grid works. Price is them somewhat affected by this and many other factors.
- Jolter 4y agoAlright, I concede I didn't think that comment through. I was only considering a national grid, at peak consumption hours, where excess power is exported and hence "disappears from view", but of course taking a global view the electricity is just consumed somewhere else. Still, with the current energy crisis, with prices at all-time highs across at least Europe, I don't know if there is anywhere where power production is not running at close to 100% capacity at peak hours. Right now it is extremely profitable to be a power producer in Europe, and you can sell every kWh you produce thanks to the countries being interconnected. The regulation capacity you're talking about is on the margin. Certain plants (like most hydro power plants) will adjust their production to keep the frequency stable, but there is certainly no excess production capacity right now.
- Shorel 4y agoAnd a million gamers are still waiting for reasonable GPU prices. Nvidia really milked that cash cow.
- me_me_me 4y agoI have a massive full tower case, it is housing my 3rd rig currently. The first one was standard pc and the motherboard with gpu looked tiny in it, I got 3070 recently and it barely fits (with hdd cage still in place), it looks ridiculously big. The card is so big it comes with a special bracket to be mounted below to support its weight. Those cards are not going down in price any more than they already are. Also worth mentioning $1,000 in 2000 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $1,719.92 today, it feels like those cards are getting expensive but part of it is cost of inflation.
- mratsim 4y agoOn the topics of gaming, the energy consumption isn't pretty https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/ https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/ - Youtube 244 TWh/year - Gold mining 240 TWh/year - Bitcoin 200 TWh/year - Ethereum PoW 112 TWh / year - Netflix 94 TWh / year - Gaming 34 TWh / year - Paypal 0.26 TWh / year - Ethereum PoS 0.01 TWh / year
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago>And it reduces the world's energy bill by 0.5% I live in Europe and the measures my county is taking to combat energy shortage are pretty wild like limiting the heating of apartments, indoor swimming pools, reducing street lighting, but nowhere was is stated "banning crypto mining". Pretty insane how we're just tolerating this massive energy waste just so some people and organizations can have something to speculate on for money.
- Tenoke 4y agoPlaces with issues at that level aren't really where much mining is happening.
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoSure, buit the energy crisis is a global issue. And you can't solve global issues using local solutions.
- ikt 4y agoI mean it's technically both, Australia sure isn't waiting for the world to rely less on coal and gas, it's pumping 10's of billions into renewables, something some of us argue should have been done years ago.
- pvigilo 4y agoNo it's not, there's a lot of stranded energy in the world. We are just missing it where we need it the most. That's why your country is doing "local solutions"
- smcl 4y agoThere are definitely cases where The Market doesn't magically fix things and regulation needs to be introduced to prevent bad behaviour (or encourage a societally beneficial behaviour). However in this case with the high cost of electricity in Europe right now, isn't crypto-mining similar to lighting money on fire? I can't imagine it's profitable in many European countries, if any.
- Gigachad 4y agoI wonder if this gets accounted for somehow, where power prices drop slightly causing bitcoin miners to pick up the savings. I’m gonna assume there won’t be some huge shutdown of power plants so this power is still being produced.
- CTDOCodebases 4y agoNow all we need to do is shutdown the gaming industry. It’s so wasteful to be using electricity when we could all be playing chess or Yazee instead.
- JonathanBeuys 4y agoe2-e4
- sph 4y agoIndeed. If energy is so important and the root of all our problems, we should stop generating and using energy altogether. I am more and more frustrated with the energy angle of crypto. We live on a technological world that consumes energy, everything has an energy cost. The goal for an advanced civilization is not reduce energy usage, but make it cheaper, cleaner and more abundant! Why does people complaining about "0.5% of world energy usage" think we're researching fusion energy? So we can stop consuming it? It's such a populist and uninformed argument that drives me up the wall. We can discuss the pros and cons of PoW and PoS, but using the "it consumes as much as X country" argument is intellectually dishonest and pushes forward a particular agenda. How much energy does porn use? Video games? Advertising? Spam? Space heaters? Surely we could do without them and consume even less energy. Do you know how we can measure the technological advancement of a civilization? By how much energy they have at their disposal ready to use. [1] Not by how much energy they have saved. We all hate climate change, let's push for cleaner energy instead of glorifying idiotic energy reduction slogans. If governments were to put a tax on energy generation from fossil fuels, crypto miners will be the first to set up hydro and solar plants to run their GPUs. Because mining makes only sense if you can get cheap energy, otherwise it's unprofitable. But that's a more nuanced and intellectual argument than "Bitcoin warms the planet!" and doesn't fit as nicely on a top-voted comment on a forum. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
- temp_account_32 4y ago
- mrpopo 4y ago
- kaba0 4y agoYou honestly say it with a straight face that 0.5% of the total electricity used by the word is not an unfathomably large number that was wasted for years with no good reason?!