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Yeah that's a fair correction. Proof of Work appears to be a much, much better solution from an energy standpoint, although I'm less informed about the nitty-gr

by boc 3y ago

Yeah that's a fair correction. Proof of Work appears to be a much, much better solution from an energy standpoint, although I'm less informed about the nitty-gritty.

digging 3y ago
You mean Proof of Stake. POW is the wasteful one.
pcthrowaway 3y ago
Proof of Stake is the widely deployed consensus model which isn't designed to waste energy. Actually, there are lots of other ones, but Proof of Work is the only one that is designed to add security by requiring a lot of hashrate (which translates to a bunch of energy) to submit blocks ("mining" in proof of work) Proof of work was a brilliant innovation at the time, but as it turns out, smart people iterate on technology over time to improve it. The fact that bitcoin didn't sink like a stone after being improved upon (just from a resource-usage perspective) by most other blockchains really highlights the greed and single-mindedness of most crypto speculators.
- FabHK 3y ago
  > Proof of Stake is the widely deployed consensus model which isn't designed to waste energy. Nicely put. PoS is still around a million times more wasteful than the effective work it does, though.
  - pcthrowaway 3y ago
    Different PoS chains will have different characteristics, but I was curious about this claim so I dug up some numbers for Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Visa: Transactions in 2023: Bitcoin: 174310000 Ethereum: 583530000 Visa: 212600000000 Energy consumption: Bitcoin: 167.8 TWh/yr Ethereum: 0.0067479963 TWh/yr Visa: 197.57 TWh/yr (2021?) Energy consumption/tx Bitcoin: 962.652745 kWh Ethereum: 0.011564 kWh Visa: 0.929304 kWh It's entirely possible some of these numbers are wrong or off so please check my math, but it looks like Ethereum is the most energy-efficient of the 3 on a per-transaction basis, maybe an order of magnitude better than Visa. Bitcoin on the other hand is 3 orders of magnitude worse than visa on a per-transaction basis. I suspect both Bitcoin and Ethereum also transact more value in USD per transaction (if you're willing to consider funny crypto money at spot prices) on average, than Visa, by virtue of them having a much higher transaction fee which is also borne by the address making the transaction. If you don't consider Ethereum transactions to be "effective work" than this isn't a relevant metric of course, but I'm curious how you're arriving at your figure.
    - FabHK 3y ago
      > curious how you're arriving at your figure Hi, sure. The nodes in the EVM do not collaborate to split the work, rather, they all perform (basically) the same work. So, you could instead run Ethereum with one node that connects to the net and receives transactions, processes them (around 20 per second - it's not exactly a lot of processing), puts them into blocks, and sends out the complete blocks. It would perform exactly the same as the current network, and would consume, say, 4 W (a Raspberry Pi, say). The one difference is that it would have to be trusted, which is the big no-no. But that's the effective work being done. But the validators burn around 1 MW (that lines up with your figure approximately) and are paid $5m a day to do that work. And 1 MW / 4 W is a factor of 250k, which I rounded up to 1m considering all the other activity around Ethereum, though feel free to round it down to 1e5.
deleted 3y ago
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by boc 3y ago

Yeah that's a fair correction. Proof of Work appears to be a much, much better solution from an energy standpoint, although I'm less informed about the nitty-gritty.

digging 3y ago

You mean Proof of Stake. POW is the wasteful one.

pcthrowaway 3y ago

Proof of Stake is the widely deployed consensus model which isn't designed to waste energy. Actually, there are lots of other ones, but Proof of Work is the only one that is designed to add security by requiring a lot of hashrate (which translates to a bunch of energy) to submit blocks ("mining" in proof of work) Proof of work was a brilliant innovation at the time, but as it turns out, smart people iterate on technology over time to improve it. The fact that bitcoin didn't sink like a stone after being improved upon (just from a resource-usage perspective) by most other blockchains really highlights the greed and single-mindedness of most crypto speculators.

FabHK 3y ago
> Proof of Stake is the widely deployed consensus model which isn't designed to waste energy. Nicely put. PoS is still around a million times more wasteful than the effective work it does, though.
- pcthrowaway 3y ago
  Different PoS chains will have different characteristics, but I was curious about this claim so I dug up some numbers for Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Visa: Transactions in 2023: Bitcoin: 174310000 Ethereum: 583530000 Visa: 212600000000 Energy consumption: Bitcoin: 167.8 TWh/yr Ethereum: 0.0067479963 TWh/yr Visa: 197.57 TWh/yr (2021?) Energy consumption/tx Bitcoin: 962.652745 kWh Ethereum: 0.011564 kWh Visa: 0.929304 kWh It's entirely possible some of these numbers are wrong or off so please check my math, but it looks like Ethereum is the most energy-efficient of the 3 on a per-transaction basis, maybe an order of magnitude better than Visa. Bitcoin on the other hand is 3 orders of magnitude worse than visa on a per-transaction basis. I suspect both Bitcoin and Ethereum also transact more value in USD per transaction (if you're willing to consider funny crypto money at spot prices) on average, than Visa, by virtue of them having a much higher transaction fee which is also borne by the address making the transaction. If you don't consider Ethereum transactions to be "effective work" than this isn't a relevant metric of course, but I'm curious how you're arriving at your figure.
  - FabHK 3y ago
    > curious how you're arriving at your figure Hi, sure. The nodes in the EVM do not collaborate to split the work, rather, they all perform (basically) the same work. So, you could instead run Ethereum with one node that connects to the net and receives transactions, processes them (around 20 per second - it's not exactly a lot of processing), puts them into blocks, and sends out the complete blocks. It would perform exactly the same as the current network, and would consume, say, 4 W (a Raspberry Pi, say). The one difference is that it would have to be trusted, which is the big no-no. But that's the effective work being done. But the validators burn around 1 MW (that lines up with your figure approximately) and are paid $5m a day to do that work. And 1 MW / 4 W is a factor of 250k, which I rounded up to 1m considering all the other activity around Ethereum, though feel free to round it down to 1e5.

deleted 3y ago

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