This one claims to be able to drastically reduce the energy consumption of mining:
The major challenge for cryptocurrencies is their energy consumption through what is called mining activity. While it is more often than not felt that the creators of digital currency don't really care, the executives of Ethereum have just presented a plan to reduce the energy consumption of the cryptocurrency considerably. This plan, if carried out properly, should allow them to reduce Ethereum's energy consumption by at least 99%, which could trigger an exodus of Bitcoin investors to this new, greener cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin is absorbing most of the cryptocurrency craze and stigma, leaving Ethereum in the shadows. But Ethereum is anything but small. Its capitalization crossed the symbolic $ 500 billion mark last week, and its energy footprint is just as large. It is estimated that Ethereum mining currently consumes a quarter of half of what Bitcoin mining consumes. According to estimates, this means that a typical Ethereum transaction gobbles up more energy than an average US household uses in a day.
“It's just a huge waste of resources, even if you don't think pollution and carbon dioxide is a problem. There are real consumers, real people, whose electricity needs are being replaced by this stuff, ”said Vitalik Buterin, the 24-year-old Russian-Canadian computer scientist who invented Ethereum. So he set out to put an end to the wasted energy of his invention. Thus, through the Ethereum Foundation, which governs the development of cryptocurrency, it plans to deploy a new code that would greatly reduce its energy consumption.
If the developers are right, then Ethereum's new code could allow transactions to be made using just 1% of the energy consumed today. The new code is based on the Proof-of-Stake algorithm, an algorithm that is said to be less power-hungry than the Proof-of-Work that Bitcoin and Bitcoin are currently based on. Ethereum. “Ethereum will complete the transition to Proof-of-Stake in the next few months, which brings a myriad of improvements theorized for years,” wrote Carl Beekhuizen of the Ethereum Foundation in a blog post today.
“One of the areas we look forward to exploring is new estimates of energy use, as we end a country's energy spending process on consensus,” he said. indicated. In his article, he estimated how much Ethereum would consume after the new code was fully deployed. Since many people use multiple validators, he decided to use the number of unique addresses that have made deposits as an indicator of how many servers exist today.
With his method, Beekhuizen determined that in total, an Ethereum Proof-of-Stake transaction consumes an amount of energy in the order of 2,62 megawatts. According to him, it is not at the level of countries, provinces or even cities, but that of a small locality (approximately 2100 American households). For reference, the Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus on Ethereum currently consumes the energy equivalent of a midsize country, but this is actually necessary to keep a PoW chain secure. As the name suggests, PoW achieves consensus based on the range on which the work is most important.
Indeed, Beekhuizen explains that there are two ways to increase the rate of "work" done: increase the efficiency of mining equipment and use more equipment at the same time. To prevent a chain from being attacked successfully, miners must do "work" at a faster rate than an attacker. Since an attacker is likely to have similar hardware, miners have to operate large amounts of effective hardware to prevent an attacker from overwhelming them, and all of this hardware consumes a lot of power.
Under the PoW, the price of ETH and hashrate would be positively correlated. Therefore, as the price increases, the energy consumed by the grid also increases in equilibrium. Under Proof-of-Stake (PoS), when the price of ETH increases, the security of the network also increases (the value of ETH at-stake is higher), but the energy requirements remain unchanged . Digiconomist estimates that Ethereum miners currently consume 44,49 TWh per year, which translates to 5,13 gigawatts on an ongoing basis.
This means that PoS is around 2 times more energy efficient, according to the conservative estimates above, which represents a reduction of at least 000% in total power consumption. Beekhuizen estimates that, if the power consumption per transaction is more than your speed, it's around 99,95Wh / tx (average around 35K gas / tx) or around 60 minutes of television. In contrast, Ethereum PoW uses the equivalent energy of a house for 20 days per transaction and Bitcoin would consume the equivalent of 2,8 days / house.
Beekhuizen announced that Ethereum continues to use PoW for now, but that will not be the case for very long. “In recent weeks, we have seen the emergence of the first test networks for The Merge. Several engineering teams are working overtime to make sure The Merge arrives as soon as possible, and without compromising safety, ”he said. Can we imagine that Bitcoin will in the future be boycotted for ecological reasons and that the new, greener Ethereum will become the new popular cryptocurrency?
Source: Carl Beekhuizen
