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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

#41

Post by chrisco255 »

GBiT wrote: post #19
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.

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.

POS has a big problem when a coin starts as proof-of-stake. I agree with this. Because there's no fair way to do distribution. Many proof-of-stake coins happen to start out with the majority of supply owned by the core devs or VCs. It ends up becoming a cartel, which is not decentralized.

I think Ethereum's approach is interesting, because after 6 years of Proof-of-Work and several up and down markets, the distribution is widespread at this point. For example, even the co-founder Vitalik, only has about 300K of 115M circulating supply. So now I feel like they can migrate to proof-of-stake and it will not lead to excessive centralization.

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

#42

Post by toomim »

toomim wrote: post #36

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 ex…

And to be complete, there are other ways that PoW blockchains can compete on energy efficiency:

1) Inflation rate

2) PoW function

3) Transaction cost after blocksize limit reached

The inflation rate determines the incentive given to miners. With less incentive, the energy use will go down. This comes at the cost of increasing the ease of a double-spend, but there is already far more than enough difficulty to double-spend at the current mining rates.

The PoW function determines the capital cost required to buy the miners themselves. If you increase the capital costs (e.g. with a memory-hard PoW function, or requiring less-efficient GPUs instead of more-efficient ASICs) then miners will be able to spend less of their costs on energy. This is one way in which Eth does well by the above metric, and is a valid way to reduce energy usage in PoW.

Of course, transitioning to proof-of-stake (as eth is doing) will eliminate the energy problem entirely.

Finally, some blockchains (e.g. BTC, ETH) have reached their capacity of transactions per second, and then users can add a fee to each transaction to incentivize mining pools to include them in a block. These fees do add incentive for miners to dump energy into their blocks. However, they are a much smaller portion of the incentive than you would expect.

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

#43

Post by shawnz »

qeternity wrote: post #32
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.

Transactions aren't the only thing which makes cryptocurrencies useful, and even then, cryptocurrency transactions aren't directly comparable to each other or to transactions in traditional financial systems since they can have a much different risk profile.

Furthermore it's not obvious that increased transaction rates are necessary yet in most cryptocurrencies and so it might not make sense to optimize for that yet. There is no point encouraging frivolous data to be added to the blockchain permanently if the demand to make useful transactions isn't there yet.

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

#44

Post by GBiT »

meowkit wrote: post #27
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.

>Basically it will make rich richer and more centralized. So PoW doesn't have this problem? It costs money to run mining hardware and supply electricity. The more valuable a PoW coin is, the greater incentive there is to run more hardware. With Bitcoin specifically the block rate is limited via the difficult adjustment. With this in mind it sounds like whoever is mining will get richer faster and centralize the compe…

You right, but I will write how I think. Incentive in not only to run more hardware, but to run more effective hardware. This incentivises innovation. In POS you don't need to do anything else. Just stake coins. No innovation, you can always be a monopoly if you have the cash to make a one-time investment. In POW you always have to invest to be competitive and have the most competing hardware.

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

#45

Post by wmf »

chrisco255 wrote: post #41
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.

POS has a big problem when a coin starts as proof-of-stake. I agree with this. Because there's no fair way to do distribution. Many proof-of-stake coins happen to start out with the majority of supply owned by the core devs or VCs. It ends up becoming a cartel, which is not decentralized. I think Ethereum's approach is interesting, because after 6 years of Proof-of-Work and several up and down markets, the distributi…

I would argue that auctions (ICOs) are fairer than mining. Devs can give themselves coins directly or they can have a dev tax (e.g. Zcash) or they can fail; I don't think it makes sense to hold crypto devs to a higher standard than, say, startups.

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

#46

Post by pmorici »

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.

It's proportional to the value a miner is awarded (ie: block reward + transaction fess) for mining a block not the price of the coin. Saying it is the price of the coin is like saying Berkshire Hathaway is worth more than Apple because their share price is a lot higher.

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

#47

Post by bogota »

Interesting but I’m not sure of the point. PoW by design is not energy efficient. The incentive is just not in the correct place. Interesting but if the goal is to show more energy efficient coins we need to be looking at different tech such as PoS. Although this might have just been a fun project someone put together in which case nice job.

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

#48

Post by pmorici »

crazypython wrote: post #23

Note that Bitcoin SV is completely controlled by miners, a 51% attack can change the rules. In the original Bitcoin, a 51% attack can only reverse recent transactions, not change the rules or compromise stored funds.

Bitcoin SV was the result of a sociopath who lied about being Satoshi Nakamoto and supporters of Bitcoin core encouraged it because it fit their political goals.

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

#49

Post by GBiT »

toomim wrote: post #36

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 ex…

You right. It's written in the FAQ of the page that metric is not really that important. But most of the treads in HN talk about tx/kw anyway... However, if Bitcoin had more transactions, I think a lot less discussion would be right now.

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

#50

Post by chrisco255 »

wmf wrote: post #45
chrisco255 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

POS has a big problem when a coin starts as proof-of-stake. I agree with this. Because there's no fair way to do distribution. Many proof-of-stake coins happen to start out with the majority of supply owned by the core devs or VCs. It ends up becoming a cartel, which is not decentralized. I think Ethereum's approach is interesting, because after 6 years of Proof-of-Work and several up and down markets, the distributi…

I would argue that auctions (ICOs) are fairer than mining. Devs can give themselves coins directly or they can have a dev tax (e.g. Zcash) or they can fail; I don't think it makes sense to hold crypto devs to a higher standard than, say, startups.

No, an ICO + POS is not fair at all. It might make sense for a crypto startup but not for a layer 1 blockchain currency. The base layer has to be plausibly neutral, or it defeats the purpose and you might as well open a Robinhood account.

Censorship resistance, plausible neutrality, decentralization, antifragility, uptime, and security are features of layer 1 blockchain systems like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

If a dev team starts off with 80% of supply they aren't going to ever achieve any of the above.

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