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.
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.
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.
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.
The energy it uses right now for full nodes and all the other infrastructure minus the energy it uses for the proof of work. If the proof of work is replaced by another proof mechanism, like proof of stake, it could be applauded.
There are many things being worked on to solve the energy usage. Proof of Stake is one, and different types of it are already in use at scale (dPoS on EOS, etc)
Social recovery wallets address the first objection.
Proof of Stake reduces blockchain energy consumption by a lot. I've seen people quoting that a proof of stake block production consumes about as much energy as a Google search.
Ethereum, which this project operates on, will eventually fully transition to Proof of Stake. In any case it's possible for the energy for Proof of Work to come entirely from renewables.
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.
https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-power-no-more/
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.
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