Live data from Hacker News

Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

coincarboncap.com

121–130 of 381 posts

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

#121

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…

Which is why I find it inevitable that any future cryptocurrency project will either have to start with Proof-of-Work during an initial minting phase then switch to Proof-of-Stake, OR use an existing blockchain to bootstrap itself, either as a fork or through airdropping. To these effects, any alternative consensus mechanism that is based on tying up a resource that's not the coin itself could be considered akin to P…

I agree.. I had an idea for a Bitcoin “unfork”.

You essentially airdrop a proof of stake coin to every existing BTC, BCH, bsv, etc address, in a ratio of the current market prices.

Call it Bitcoin one, or BONE. Different from onecoin.

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

#122
Largely meaningless numbers, because energy efficiency scales inversely (loosely speaking) with network size. You can do some nice tricks to improve efficiency, but the scaling will never be good, as these networks all use the same consensus algorithms. The only project I've seen with fundamentally superior scaling is Avalanche, but it's new technology and I'm not yet entirely convinced.

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

#123
post #47

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.

Agreed. It's a really nice idea and I'd love to see at least the top 10 coins by market cap and the top 10 most and least efficient on the list. Crypto is here to stay, so if this site can promote coins that are the most energy efficient then it can have some real environmental impact.

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

#124
post #94

Bitcoin cash and SV are low on the carbon emission cause they forked from BTC right? So they re-used bitcoins early work. Or am I totally wrong here?

No, Because SV does not limit block size which allows tremendous throughput. Google block size war. >re-used bitcoins early work All forks share the same blockchain up until certain block.

We’ll, for POW coins the “energy efficiency” falls directly out of the market cap divided by the number of transactions.

BSV has essentially free transactions and not a high market cap, and so has a (suspiciously?) high txn count to price ratio.

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

#125
Kind of a self-defeating list. As a PoW cryptocurrency becomes more popular, the value of a single coin goes up, so the mining reward will go up in terms of USD. As a result, the equilibrium energy usage in mining goes up proportionally to the increase in value. So if people start using a cryptocurrency because it is more efficient, it will stop being efficient.

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

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On your website that you linked says "We conduct our business in a way that protects ... our planet's climate against warming." Can you elaborate how providing infra to mine Bitcoin is helping the planet against global warming? Aren't you doing the exact opposite? If you are using 100% green energy, that energy can be used for something productive not providing PoW. Note Bitcoin alone currently consumes 0.55% of worl…

> that energy can be used for something productive A decentralized/borderless/censorship-resistant/virtual currency is one of the most productive things we can use energy for. It might not be as apparent in the US or the developed world, but Bitcoin is a life-saver for many people in countries with crumbling currencies. We waste a lot of energy on things that are far more more useless (like christmas lights for examp…

[deleted]

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

#128
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, rather than thinking about transactions we should ask whether the existence of Bitcoin as a whole is worth 6 GW of power.

Haven’t the people spending the GWs of power already done that?

Ultimately the money comes from people buying in to Bitcoin and many of them are not aware of the power consumption or the fact that it's possible to achieve number go up with virtually no energy.

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

#129
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, rather than thinking about transactions we should ask whether the existence of Bitcoin as a whole is worth 6 GW of power.

Haven’t the people spending the GWs of power already done that?

I think a more thorough societal discussion about what our goals are given tight carbon budgets is what they're getting at, not the individual decision of someone to mine it.

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

#130
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.

Why are BSV and BCH insecure?

Their hashrates are really low relative to market cap.
Post reply on HN