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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

#171

Post by skybrian »

wpietri wrote: post #145
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…

> A better metric would be "energy use per double-spend that was prevented." Not for a general audience. The purpose of a currency is to enable transactions. Internally, I get why people involved might fuss about the metric. But from the societal perspective it's reasonable to ask, "What does it cost per unit of value created?"

Okay as far as it goes, but it doesn't explain how to fix the problem. We need to drum up interest for a solution.

The way I like to explain it is that Bitcoin is collectively giving away about $1.5 billion a month in prize money to miners. That's the root of the problem. Miners will spend up to $1.5 billion a month on electricity (mainly) and their other expenses. Currently it's about 10x Google's electricity usage.

Total revenue is proportional to the block reward (an algorithmic parameter) and Bitcoin price. So to fix this, either they could reduce the block reward ahead of schedule (won't happen) or something could happen to crash Bitcoin's price. More transaction volume would actually be better if it were due to a fire sale.

Taxing holdings of Bitcoin would be a way to convince people and businesses to sell and discourage buying, at least for those that pay their taxes.

Or who knows, maybe threatening to do this would result in enough consensus to accelerate the block reward halving schedule?

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

#172

Post by 22c »

bhaak wrote: post #73
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.

USDT does not run solely on Ethereum. Currently it's about 50:50 Ethereum and Tron (of all things!). https://wallet.tether.to/transparency USDC is likewise a multichain stablecoin (Ethereum, Stellar, Algorand, and Solana) but I couldn't find information on how much is on each chain.

I'm also assuming that these transparency reports don't count when an asset has been bridged to another network.

A big chunk of USDC and USDT floating around on smaller PoS networks have been bridged from ERC20, so would appear to be idling on ERC20 but could actually be exchanging hands on a completely separate network.

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

#174

Post by atweiden »

rawtxapp wrote: post #91
meowkit wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

While you need to be rich to be able to mine Bitcoin, you also have to dump those mined coins on the exchanges to cover your running costs (electricity, hardware, server operators, etc).

> While you need to be rich to be able to mine Bitcoin, you also have to dump those mined coins on the exchanges to cover your running costs (electricity, hardware, server operators, etc)

You don’t have to be rich to mine physical bitcoins, you just won’t mine very many of them. Same as it works in PoS — join a mining pool.

Or buy mining equities, e.g. Blockstream’s BMN token (not an investor).

It’s funny how much flak PoW networks take from PoS investors, and it’s pretty blatantly due to investors investing in things which aren’t PoW. None of the PoW criticisms in play today save for the environmental ones — and even those are subject to considerable astroturfing [1] — are supported by fact. In spite of what PoS investors commonly tout, PoS as a technology is neither theoretically sound, nor practically proven in any sense [2].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26649379

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27144921

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

#175

Post by xur17 »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #57
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…

I agree about the suggestion to look at transaction capacity, however: - Bitcoin is operating at capacity and has shown unwillingness to adjust capacity, so the "kWh/tx" is valid for Bitcoin. - Transaction fees increase the block reward, and as a consequence, the energy that can be used for mining before it becomes unprofitable. This is currently only about 10% of the total reward miners get for mining a block on the…

> Bitcoin is operating at capacity and has shown unwillingness to adjust capacity, so the "kWh/tx" is valid for Bitcoin.

Bitcoin's layer 1 is operating at capacity - different networks make different tradeoffs. Bitcoin has gone the "less change" and "more decentralization" route by keeping layer 1 small, with the goal of moving transaction volume to layer 2.

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

#177

Post by agravier »

Milkman128 wrote: post #137
jv0010 wrote: post #126

Chia (XCH) coin would be interesting to see on that list seeing it basis was being an eco friendly crypto

If you can account for the resources of each hard drive it kills

Indeed, we should also account for such material resources allocated or wasted by all proof-of-some-resource crypto.

Like the number of GPUS hoarded up by a non-ASIC PoW coin, or even the manufacturing of specialized miners.

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

#178

Post by SubiculumCode »

wyager wrote: post #165
dane-pgp wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if this is how it works, but it should be possible to avoid the "re-roll" problem: Each node picks a random value, and publishes the hash of it to the blockchain, then, when the network has reached finality on what all the hashes are, the nodes publish the random values themselves, and the network takes the XOR of all of them.

Nodes can simply choose not to publish their value if the result is unfavorable to them, and this tanks the whole procedure. This isn’t a problem unique to your scheme; they all suffer from things like this.

Usually a double spend attacks on PoS might need a collusion reaching upwards of 66%. That seems fairly improbable to me.

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

#180

Post by _9omd »

chrisco255 wrote: post #50
wmf wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tea…

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

I completely agree, all the the above must come before throughput in an L1 blockchain. So many of the so called ETH killers sacrifice on some or all of the items you listed. Do you think anything else ticks all the boxes and can stand alongside BTC and ETH as a legitimate L1?

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