It's weird to celebrate the electricity savings of Ethereum like this. It's good that it's less energy-intensive now, but it was that energy-intensive before because of Ethereum in the first place.
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
Ethereum is useless as a payment mechanism unless you like paying wildly varying fees, and therefore its benefits do not offset it (relatively less) energy use.
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.
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.
reply