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.
the energy usage of bitcoin and the altcoins is, in my opinion, one of the few things that could threaten its viability long term. people aren't going to be able to understand the reasoning that this is the cost of decentralization - it's going to look like a phenomenal waste of energy, even if low-powered ASICs are doing most of the work. not that the average consumer has a problem with that, but govts might.
i wonder if there is a solution to the byzantine general's problem with that is resistant to 50% malicious nodes but doesn't require so much energy overhead. even proof-of-stake coins still require energy wasting.
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.
Bitcoin (and all other Proof-of-Work cryptos, which is basically all the major ones) only consume tons of power because the incentive to mine creates an arms race where whoever has the most hashing power makes the most money.
Bitcoin could be run on a single computer mining on a 10 year old CPU, but then it would be highly centralized, and decentralization is touted as one of the greatest features of Bitcoin. But with the incentive to run your own miner(s), and make it/them as powerful as you can to get the largest piece of the block reward pie, it ends up being a massive energy sink.
That's why people are pushing for the change to Proof-of-Stake in Ethereum. By taking away the incentive to waste tons of power on mining, it drastically reduces the carbon footprint of it.
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.
Yeah but... the crypto algorithm chosen for Bitcoin is about as energy intensive as they come. Other algorithms which are more equipment intensive - scrypt etc - provide the same benefits but without the same disgusting externality of power consumption.
I wish I grasped proof of stake better. I’m not yet convinced it can be made to work as well as PoW.
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.
It sure would be nice if more people noticed proof of stake cryptocurrencies (which cut electricity usage by something like 99.99%) like Ethereum instead of the prevailing Bitcoin myopia.
Your argument is completely valid against Ethereum and Bitcoin, I hope they will be used less to reduce the energy used by crypto. However the vast majority of others use Proof of Stake and a fraction of the energy. Take Solana, currently the 5th largest by MCAP, a tx uses a similar amount of energy as two Google searches. I am pointing this out as I see often the whole crypto market lumped together but crypto networks are not all created equally. Some are 10 years old and others are 2 years with vastly different implementations.
It's worth mentioning Ethereum has been planning to switch to proof-of-stake (PoS) mining instead fo proof-of-work (Pow) for a long while now. They even have a "time bomb" built into their PoW algorithm they have to "reset" every once in a while because these original plans were more aggressive.
I'm not necessarily in favor of PoS, but it does "solve" the electricity concerns you are raising.
Also insert here long winded explanation of how much power is used by existing banking infrastructure.
This is one of many reasons why Ethereum is moving to Proof of Stake (PoS) and ditching Proof of Work (PoW). The already functional Ethereum 2.0 chain has Bitcoin's security guarantees for a tiny fraction of the electricity costs.
Bitcoin's yearly electricity consumption is now estimated at $3.8 billion. This must be sustained indefinitely, and is a huge target for regulation and nation state interference.
Bitcoin's "store of value" has a forever price tag in the billions yearly. This doesn't make economic sense.
If Ethereum can fulfill Bitcoin's role as a "store of value" at a much lower yearly cost, I don't see how it would not eventually become more attractive as a store of value.
For a great detailed explanation on why PoS is better see Vitalk's blog. Vitalik views attacks on chains in terms of costs, which IMHO is the proper paradigm to quantify attack costs.
(BTW, the TLS cert looks like it has an issue at the moment).
In 2011 I assumed Bitcoin would transition because PoW's weaknesses were obvious. Unfortunately, the majority of the leftovers in Bitcoin no longer share my sentiment. Electricity consumption is a reason that PoW is the most likely downfall of Bitcoin if they don't transition to another technology. To keep PoW Bitcoin will need to morph into something else, like a semi-centralized "reserve" asset which is not a technology that excites me. A scalable ecosystem where large volumes of economic value can be transferred excites me. Everyday use excites me.
You can "hide" an Ethereum PoS server in your basement. You can't hide the massive electricity usage, transportation, and manufacturing of specialized hardware used in a Bitcoin ASIC farm. The specialization also means there's a huge centralization pressure in the Bitcoin network. I personally welcome (reasonable) regulation, but if I was concerned about regulation as many Bitcoiners tout, PoW would not be an effective way of implementing regulation resistance.
Kinda crazy how people stick to Bitcoin but preach decentralisation. You can't be half way noble.
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