Ethereum is switching off its mining in favor of another consensus system called "proof-of-stake." Basically the mining hardware and electricity are replaced by the currency itself. There's a consensus protocol that works if people don't cheat in certain ways, it's provable if someone cheats, and the "miners" lock some ETH into the system as a security bond. If someone submits a proof that you cheated then you lose your bond. Energy consumption will drop by an estimated 99.95%.
Most web3 stuff runs on Ethereum, which is the second-biggest energy consumer in crypto. Bitcoin is the biggest and has no plans to move to proof-of-stake, but isn't really involved in web3.
Ethereum's proof-of-stake protocol has been running in parallel for a year with billions of dollars in real ETH deposited, and for the merged system there's a multi-client testnet running.
Ethereum does have plans to switch to 'proof of stake' (as opposed to its current 'proof of work') which would dramatically decrease the power consumption.
It can do this because it doesn't rely on any sort of "work." It's just another internet protocol.
Proof of stake doesn't have anything to do with tps, so that won't change significantly. The solutions to that are rollups (second layers that inherit the full security of the main chain) and sharding (which multiplies the capacity of rollups). Some rollup systems are in production today, capable of a couple thousand tps. According to the most recent plan I saw, sharding would multiply that by twenty, initially.
Once proof of stake is fully implemented and everything is migrated over, there will be no more energy intensive mining. Mining on a proof of stake chain just involves putting your Ether as a deposit that gets slashed if you act maliciously, the energy cost of this is just to run the servers, essentially, its you putting your money where your mouth is. Potentially, by the time proof of stake is fully released, the cost to run your own node (32 ETH) could be between 100-500k depending on the market value of Ether.
The benefit of this with the mining algorithm that Ethereum uses is that you can mine with off the shelf consumer parts. When proof of stake is fully switched to, those parts will just be sold on the market.
With Bitcoin, switching over to something like proof of stake will be extremely political and will only work out if the market decides that the new proof of stake blockchain fork is the 'real' Bitcoin. It will be political because miner's mining hardware becomes e-waste so they have an incentive to continue mining regardless of the fork. The only way that miners stop mining Bitcoin is if the blockchain becomes worthless in the market so that the miners no longer can afford to pay their operating costs with the mining rewards.
Ethereum was using an algorithm called "Proof of Work" to secure the blockchain's state and it was using huge amount of energy as it literally was using hashing power of GPUs to verify/generate Ethereum "blocks" (immutable units containing transactions) to get Ether as rewards.
The Merge changed this algorithm to "Proof of Stake", killing the GPU mining and the energy consumption completely (at least for Ethereum) and the new algorithm secures the network by giving incentives to Ether stakeholders (anyone can be, by the way) to secure the network instead of computing hashes on GPUs. This single event reduced world's energy usage by 0.2% overnight.
Some are working on a consensus system called proof of stake which does not use energy. It is not clear whether it will be fully secure, etc., but if you read about this stuff decades ago you might want to google and research primarily Bitcoin and Ethereum.
The energy used to secure PoW networks is indeed wasteful. But just a heads-up, Ethereum is currently transitioning to Proof of Stake consensus mechanism which will reduce electricity costs by an order of magnitude.
Or we could all switch to Ethereum, which will have Proof of Stake (low electricity costs) instead of Proof of Work (insanely high electricity costs) mining soon.
An experimental update to Ethereum, the world’s second-biggest cryptocurrency, has led to a dramatic reduction in the energy used to secure the currency and verify transactions
The Ethereum community started talking about this five years ago, which spawned a multi-year effort to move to "Proof of Stake" and stop using large amounts of electricity forever.
Since 99% of blockchain app activity occurs within the Ethereum ecosystem, and Ethereum is dropping proof of work, we should put to bed the idea that crypto industry insiders don't care about this issue or aren't doing anything to solve it.
There are blockchains with low energy consumption profiles.
Ethereum for its part is turning off energy-intensive PoW around July this year, to rely solely on its energy efficient PoS Beacon Chain for consensus.
This is FUD. If the electricity consumption becomes prohibitive, Bitcoin will just switch to Proof-of-Stake. Ethereum's already doing it. Zero electrical waste.
Most web3 stuff runs on Ethereum, which is the second-biggest energy consumer in crypto. Bitcoin is the biggest and has no plans to move to proof-of-stake, but isn't really involved in web3.
Ethereum's proof-of-stake protocol has been running in parallel for a year with billions of dollars in real ETH deposited, and for the merged system there's a multi-client testnet running.
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