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Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

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Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#31

Post by chrisco255 »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #8
danielvf wrote: post #3

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.

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...

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.

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#32

Post by qeternity »

wmf wrote: post #25

Txs / MWh is not a valid metric for most cryptocurrencies since power consumption is proportional to price, not transactions. Also, BSV and BCH are totally insecure so it's not really fair to compare them to secure cryptocurrencies.

Of course it’s a valid metric. The whole point of this is that most crypto is not used to transact, but to speculate, and so a high price and therefore high carbon footprint with a low transaction throughput is often the whole point of these analyses.

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#33

Post by dvh »

danielvf wrote: post #12
Judgmentality wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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.

Python 3 is better than python 2 and people will soon switch.

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#34

Post by chrisco255 »

Judgmentality wrote: post #5
danielvf wrote: post #3

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.

> 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?

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/

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#35

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

evanrich wrote: post #30

Would eth2.0 have a significantly higher txs/mwh? I have read 99% reduction in some places. Seems well positioned to top this list.

Yes should be about 1% of what it is now. This is is why I am investing hard in Ethereum right now while I still can.

I truly do not see Bitcoin sustaining much longer as the top coin.

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#36

Post by toomim »

As a Bitcoin miner (https://toom.im), while I appreciate the work put into it, this particular metric of "transactions per kW" might not work the way you expect.

The main point that you should understand is that a PoW blockchain's energy usage is not proportional to its transactions.

I'll say that a different way: the transactions themselves do not use any energy in mining.

I'll say this in a third way: it takes exactly the same amount of energy to mine an empty block as it does a 1GB block of transactions, as it does a 1,000,000,000 PB block.

In reality, transactions are all hashed together in a mining pool into a single numeric hash before miners ever see them. It doesn't matter how many transactions are included in the hash. The hashpower just has to find a magic number matching that hash.

On the other hand, the #1 factor that increases a blockchain's energy usage is its price per coin. The price of a coin is how much that coin is worth to be mined, which is the incentive for miners to dump energy into mining it. In steady state, miners will dump energy into mining a coin until the cost of energy = the value of the coins coming out.

This is why you can see Bitcoin SV at the top of the list -- it's worth the least of the Bitcoins.

And it's also misleading to compute the second factor -- transactions per second -- by counting the actual transactions on the blockchain, rather than looking at the transaction capacity. Because blockchains only cost something per transaction once they reach capacity. This is misleading with Bitcoin SV, for instance, because that coin artificially creates bogus transactions on its blockchain in order to make it look popular and demonstrate the vision of large blockchains. Bitcoin Cash, on the other hand, can handle a thousands of transactions per second (on testnet) but doesn't clog its live blockchain with them.

So, in sum, if you send a transaction on Bitcoin Cash, it will cost 0 kW of electricity, even though it says 31.3 Txs/MWh (which equates to 31.9kW/Tx) in this chart. This is because transactions do not cost anything in electricity. Electricity only goes to preventing double-spends. A better metric would be "energy use per double-spend that was prevented."

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#37

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

zdragnar wrote: post #21
mistrial9 wrote: post #13

if a huge hydro power generator in a remote location on a far away continent wastes local energy, does my city power bill go up? because of BTC ? tell me more

Might be. If the hydro generator isn't supplying enough energy to the local area because of BTC, then presumably a higher load falls on petro energy to fill in the gap in supply. That influences the global market a tiny amount. Your power bill likewise is affected, presuming your provider has any petro in its supply mix, which it likely does (even if only as a backup). The impact is tiny to nonexistent at a scale of…

Or more succinctly: Electricity tends to be fungible and move over geographically large networks, so most of it is probably interchangeable even over large areas/distance.

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#38

Post by chrisco255 »

dvh wrote: post #33
danielvf wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Python 3 is better than python 2 and people will soon switch.

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.

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#39

Post by GBiT »

Cantinflas wrote: post #24
GBiT wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#40

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

A fascinating thought experiment would be to have a further breakdown by "non-speculative" transaction. It's difficult/impossible to compute whether a transaction's purpose is speculation, but given that that's most of what these coins are currently used for, it would surprise me if less than half of these transactions are for the purpose of price speculation. This is going to make these coins compare substantially less favorably compared to e.g. credit cards or cash money.
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