[HN Gopher] Coin Carbon Cap - PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by ene... ___________________________________________________________________ Coin Carbon Cap - PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency Author : GBiT Score : 117 points Date : 2021-05-16 18:35 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (coincarboncap.com) (TXT) w3m dump (coincarboncap.com) | dgjnvhhb wrote: | This is dumb. The transaction confirmations are not equivalent | between chains. | dehrmann wrote: | This actually points out why Tesla not accepting bitcoin for | environmental reasons is silly: 134.0 kg of CO2 per transaction | about as much CO2 as a tank of gas. This is ridiculously | inefficient, but _it 's a car;_ the energy inputs are already | high. | | The real issue is the interest Musk created when Tesla bought | bitcoin a few months ago and how he grew a conscious suspiciously | fast. | danielvf wrote: | 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. | chrisco255 wrote: | Are they double-counting the Ethereum tokens like Chainlink, | Uniswap, etc? Ethereum hashing inherently includes ERC20 | transactions. ERC20s are just state changes on the Ethereum | blockchain and don't affect hashing use or non-use. | Judgmentality wrote: | > so once Ethereum finishes its switch over to proof-of-stake | | Isn't there a lot of uncertainty as to how well proof-of-stake | will work? | chrisco255 wrote: | No, proof-of-stake has been live since December. The final | remaining migration is The Merge, which is estimated to occur | towards the end of this year, March 2022 at the absolute | latest. For more info, see: https://ethmerge.com/ | danielvf wrote: | ETH2 (proof-of-stake) already has 16 billion dollars of ETH | locked into it, and has been running for months. The proof- | of-stake switchover seems to be on a good track and should | work form technical standpoint. | dvh wrote: | Python 3 is better than python 2 and people will soon | switch. | chrisco255 wrote: | Programming language upgrades are not the same as | blockchain upgrades. Blockchains work on consensus, so | you need a majority of nodes to agree with your changes | to the chain or you risk a hard fork. At any rate, ETH2 | proof-of-stake is already live, the last remaining piece | is The Merge, which merges the existing proof-of-work | chain into the already live and operational ETH2 proof- | of-stake validator nodes. | viraptor wrote: | People have largely switched already. Py2 is gone from | default installs these days. So yes, even if it takes a | while, people often do switch to better solutions. | Judgmentality wrote: | https://dev.to/hugovk/python-version-share-over- | time-6-1jb8 | | It seems like Python 2 is still pretty prevalent, with | over 40% of new downloads taking place as of last year. | And people forget Python 3 was originally introduced in | 2008. So the transition is taking decades, not years. | | The last place I worked was still using Python 2 as of | last year, and they were a startup without all the | bureaucracy of a big company. They also had plenty of | money and engineers. Python 2 is still the default for | everybody I know. | [deleted] | onlyrealcuzzo wrote: | Am I reading something wrong? | | To me, it looks like it is saying that Bitcoin uses 830kWh and | Ethereum uses almost 38 times that. | | Considering >1% of the world's energy is used by Bitcoin - it | seems virtually impossible for Ethereum to use 38x more | energy... | chrisco255 wrote: | Bitcoin SV is a barely used esoteric fork of Bitcoin with a | $5.5B market cap. It's a cash grab from a minority fork of | BTC or BCH miners. | 988747 wrote: | It is fun to see something with $5.5B market cap being | called "esoteric" and "barely used". I wish I had a side | project with similar market cap :P | terhechte wrote: | Bitcoin SV != Bitcoin. SV is a Bitcoin fork. Bitcoin is at | the bottom of the list | bhaak wrote: | 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. | GBiT wrote: | We will see how proof of stake will work, and in FAQ is a paper | about it. POS have one big problem, that you only have to buy | coins once and stake them and you will get richer every day by | doing nothing without any additional investment. Basically it | will make rich richer and more centralized. We will see how it | will works in future. | meowkit wrote: | >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 competition. | | PoS just abstracts all of this into the code itself. I don't | buy the quoted argument. | GBiT wrote: | You right, but I will write how I think. Incentive in not | only to run more hardware, but to run more effective | hardware. This incentivises innovation. In POS you don't | need to do anything else. Just stake coins. No innovation, | you can always be a monopoly if you have the cash to make a | one-time investment. In POW you always have to invest to be | competitive and have the most competing hardware. | viraptor wrote: | > This incentivises innovation. | | It's only innovation into how to extract more profit from | that specific pow function. Why would we care about it? | (Or why call that innovation?) | | > In POW you always have to invest to be competitive and | have the most competing hardware. | | I struggle up find a positive impact of this. There's | been a number of negative side effects though. | chrisco255 wrote: | POS has a big problem when a coin starts as proof-of-stake. I | agree with this. Because there's no fair way to do | distribution. Many proof-of-stake coins happen to start out | with the majority of supply owned by the core devs or VCs. It | ends up becoming a cartel, which is not decentralized. | | I think Ethereum's approach is interesting, because after 6 | years of Proof-of-Work and several up and down markets, the | distribution is widespread at this point. For example, even | the co-founder Vitalik, only has about 300K of 115M | circulating supply. So now I feel like they can migrate to | proof-of-stake and it will not lead to excessive | centralization. | wmf wrote: | 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. | chrisco255 wrote: | 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 team starts off with 80% of supply they aren't | going to ever achieve any of the above. | wmf wrote: | I wonder about an ICO that gets burned... | thescriptkiddie wrote: | > you will get richer every day by doing nothing | | I have some bad news for you about the dominant economic | system. | Cantinflas wrote: | This is not true, you have to run a validator to get | rewarded. Rewards will be much less than miners get now, and | the whole "rich get richer" is literally how investment works | in basically anything, even Bitcoin mining | GBiT wrote: | Yes, running a validator will cost some money. I will | explain how I think. If the rich want to get richer he have | to make good investment decisions and some work. In POS you | don't have to do anything at all, just buy and hold. So in | POS, you don't need to innovate your business model. In | POW, you always have to innovate to be a leader. Bitcoin | ASIC innovation in last years shows how strong competition | is. And competition makes innovation. In POS you just keep | coins and stake them. Thats it | shawnz wrote: | This is often claimed to be an advantage of PoS: you | can't get an extra increase in rate of profits by being | richer (beyond the linear increase you'd expect). With | PoW on the other hand, the richest have the best access | to the most innovative technology and so you get | superlinear profits the richer you are. | GBiT wrote: | Real world case: Intel had the most advanced chip and | more money, until one day AMD got better. In POS this | scenario is impossible. First will always be first. | evanrich wrote: | Would eth2.0 have a significantly higher txs/mwh? I have read 99% | reduction in some places. Seems well positioned to top this list. | JohnJamesRambo wrote: | Yes should be about 1% of what it is now. This is is why I am | investing hard in Ethereum right now while I still can. | | I truly do not see Bitcoin sustaining much longer as the top | coin. | LAMike wrote: | If anyone wants to learn about BSV, simply Google | | "Florida perjury Craig Wright" | yayr wrote: | There will be a time, where we have legislation to ban energy- | inefficient crypto-currencies from being traded on regulated | exchanges. This would make any proof of work currency essentially | useless in the legislated areas. My bet is, EU will start, others | will follow. This will lead to pressure to convert BTC, ETH etc. | finally to proof of stake variants. | huntertwo wrote: | This is a solid idea, but needs more currencies like Cardano and | Polkadot that claim energy efficiency as their strength | ujuj wrote: | Wouldn't it be harder to evaluate in PoS-based | cryptocurrencies? | [deleted] | everfree wrote: | PoS-based cryptocurrencies use thousands of times less | electricity than PoW-based ones, so all PoW cryptos would be | above all PoS cryptos in the ranking. It wouldn't be an | interesting chart. | wmf wrote: | On the contrary, that's the message that people need to see. | adflux wrote: | Disclaimer: you own bitcoin | noxer wrote: | From the FAQ Page: | | >What about Ripple/IOTA/...? | | >As with Proof of Stake we are aware of no existing, alternative | protocol that has solved the problem of distributed consensus. | Usually these approaches have resulted in some form of | centralized authority becoming an important factor in the | security model. | | >Of course a centralized systems can achieve a far greater energy | efficiency. Here we want to compare only distributed systems and | their properties. | | ---------- | | Everyone should know by now that Ripple is a company not a | blockchain. And the XRPL is fully decentral with no authority at | all. | | See XRPL.org | makomk wrote: | Ripple is pretty much fully centralised last I checked - | there's a list of nodes controlled by the company and a few | other companies involved in setting it up which decide which | version of transaction history is valid, and nodes outside that | list have no say in their decisions. In theory you can use your | own list of nodes, but it's a bad idea to ever do so. Since who | you choose to trust has no effect on the Ripple-sanctioned set | of transactions and you really don't want your version of | history to ever diverge from theirs because then you'll | disagree with everyone else on the planet about which | transactions are valid, diverging from their chosen trusted | list has only downsides. | noxer wrote: | Did you read the post? Ripple is a company ofc its | centralized. | | The XRPL is the "blockchain" and its NOT controlled by | Ripple. They maintain the open source code that does not give | any control over the running network at all. | | >Ripple-sanctioned set of transactions | | Thats a made up thing. There is not a single Tx that has ever | been "sanctioned" on the XRPL Its also simply not possible. | You are completely misinformed or intentionally spreading | FUD. The time when Ripple ran the whole network is long gone. | fastball wrote: | Does XRPL no longer have a unique node list that is mostly | under the control of Ripple (because they maintain the default | that clients automatically use)? | | https://cryptobriefing.com/is-xrp-decentralized-ripples-invo... | | Could the system still be decentralized in practice? Sure. But | the fact that the Ripple CTO claimed XRP might be _more | decentralized_ than BTC or ETH makes me take the rest of their | claims with huge buckets of salt. | toomim wrote: | 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 exactly the same amount of | energy to mine an empty block as it does a 1GB block of | transactions, as it does a 1,000,000,000 PB block. | | In reality, transactions are all hashed together in a mining pool | into a single numeric hash before miners ever see them. It | doesn't matter how many transactions are included in the hash. | The hashpower just has to find a magic number matching that hash. | | On the other hand, the #1 factor that increases a blockchain's | energy usage is its price per coin. The price of a coin is how | much that coin is worth to be mined, which is the incentive for | miners to dump energy into mining it. In steady state, miners | will dump energy into mining a coin until the cost of energy = | the value of the coins coming out. | | This is why you can see Bitcoin SV at the top of the list -- it's | worth the least of the Bitcoins. | | And it's also misleading to compute the second factor -- | transactions per second -- by counting the actual transactions on | the blockchain, rather than looking at the transaction capacity. | Because blockchains only cost something per transaction once they | reach capacity. This is misleading with Bitcoin SV, for instance, | because that coin artificially creates bogus transactions on its | blockchain in order to make it look popular and demonstrate the | vision of large blockchains. Bitcoin Cash, on the other hand, can | handle a thousands of transactions per second (on testnet) but | doesn't clog its live blockchain with them. | | So, in sum, if you send a transaction on Bitcoin Cash, it will | cost 0 kW of electricity, even though it says 31.3 Txs/MWh (which | equates to 31.9kW/Tx) in this chart. This is because transactions | do not cost anything in electricity. Electricity only goes to | preventing double-spends. A better metric would be "energy use | per double-spend that was prevented." | baby wrote: | Indeed, I'd say this Tx/power is the most misleading metric | here. Bitcoin is slow (7tx/s) compared to what for example | Algorand boasts they will achieve at the end of the year | (25000tx/s). | paulgb wrote: | I've gone back and forth on this myself, but I think it is | valid to consider the cost of the entire network as a matter of | carbon accounting. After all, one of Bitcoin's selling points | is the difficulty of a double-spend. This wouldn't be the case | if Bitcoin mining was not subsidized from the pool of unmined | coins. | wmf wrote: | Yes, rather than thinking about transactions we should ask | whether the existence of Bitcoin as a whole is worth 6 GW of | power. | toomim wrote: | And to be complete, there _are_ other ways that PoW blockchains | can compete on energy efficiency: | | 1) Inflation rate | | 2) PoW function | | 3) Transaction cost after blocksize limit reached | | The inflation rate determines the incentive given to miners. | With less incentive, the energy use will go down. This comes at | the cost of increasing the ease of a double-spend, but there is | already far more than enough difficulty to double-spend at the | current mining rates. | | The PoW function determines the capital cost required to buy | the miners themselves. If you increase the capital costs (e.g. | with a memory-hard PoW function, or requiring less-efficient | GPUs instead of more-efficient ASICs) then miners will be able | to spend less of their costs on energy. This is one way in | which Eth does well by the above metric, and is a valid way to | reduce energy usage in PoW. | | Of course, transitioning to proof-of-stake (as eth is doing) | will eliminate the energy problem entirely. | | Finally, some blockchains (e.g. BTC, ETH) have reached their | capacity of transactions per second, and then users can add a | fee to each transaction to incentivize mining pools to include | them in a block. These fees _do_ add incentive for miners to | dump energy into their blocks. However, they are a much smaller | portion of the incentive than you would expect. | hn_throwaway_99 wrote: | > In steady state, miners will dump energy into mining a coin | until the cost of energy = the value of the coins coming out. | | Exactly, that's why if you're using this list to somehow decide | coin X is more "efficient" than coin Y, then it's a foolhardy | exercise. | | For proof of work to actually work, the cost of the electricity | _has_ to be proportional to the total market cap of the coin. | Otherwise, if the amount of work was low compared to the value | of the network, it would be a strong incentive for someone to | try to attack it. | GBiT wrote: | You right. It's written in the FAQ of the page that metric is | not really that important. But most of the treads in HN talk | about tx/kw anyway... However, if Bitcoin had more | transactions, I think a lot less discussion would be right now. | tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: | 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 (BTC) | blockchain, but it is something to consider. The corresponding | part of the energy usage would, at a fixed fee, be proportional | to transactions. | dheera wrote: | Mildly off topic question: | | If one had Bitcoin in an exchange instead of an offline wallet, | does that mean that when forks occur, the exchange does not give | you coins in the fork? | | Also, what about PoS coins? Aren't those vastly more efficient | than any of these? | danielvf wrote: | That depends on the exchange. Some of them do, if the fork | eventually becomes very popular. It's not anything to count on | though. | Sekhmet wrote: | > If one had Bitcoin in an exchange instead of an offline | wallet, does that mean that when forks occur, the exchange does | not give you coins in the fork? | | In most cases you do get new coins post-fork. Exchange will | announce whether they support the fork or not before it | happens, so you can react. | asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: | A fascinating thought experiment would be to have a further | breakdown by "non-speculative" transaction. It's | difficult/impossible to compute whether a transaction's purpose | is speculation, but given that that's most of what these coins | are currently used for, it would surprise me if less than half of | these transactions are for the purpose of price speculation. This | is going to make these coins compare substantially less favorably | compared to e.g. credit cards or cash money. | baby wrote: | > It is great to see effort being put into researching cleaner | alternatives. Unfortunately, there is no working PoS-based system | that does not rely on some degree of centralization in its | security model. | | This is false. See Algorand, Cardano, Mina, etc. | | Proof-of-work is very much a technology of the past. It's the | fossil fuel of cryptocurrencies. | gruez wrote: | There's a [dead] comment that brings up a good point, so I'll | repost it here. | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27176459 | | > This is dumb. The transaction confirmations are not equivalent | between chains. | | Specifically, if there were two identical cryptocurrencies that | only differ by difficulty (eg. coin A with difficulty of 1 and | coin B with difficulty of 10), the coin with the lower difficulty | might be 10x more efficient, but also 10x easier to rewrite. For | proof of stake coins, it's essentially "free" if you can get | enough people on board (since you won't be penalized, only the | losing chain would be). | mistrial9 wrote: | if a huge hydro power generator in a remote location on a far | away continent wastes local energy, does my city power bill go | up? because of BTC ? tell me more | glutamate wrote: | FTFY: If a huge coal power station emits tons of CO2 to mine | funnycoins for cryptobros, will the sea levels still rise? | zdragnar wrote: | Might be. If the hydro generator isn't supplying enough energy | to the local area because of BTC, then presumably a higher load | falls on petro energy to fill in the gap in supply. | | That influences the global market a tiny amount. Your power | bill likewise is affected, presuming your provider has any | petro in its supply mix, which it likely does (even if only as | a backup). | | The impact is tiny to nonexistent at a scale of 1, but for | numbers greater than 1 the impact likewise increases. | yjftsjthsd-h wrote: | Or more succinctly: Electricity tends to be fungible and move | over geographically large networks, so _most_ of it is | probably interchangeable even over large areas /distance. | bogota wrote: | Interesting but I'm not sure of the point. PoW by design is not | energy efficient. The incentive is just not in the correct place. | Interesting but if the goal is to show more energy efficient | coins we need to be looking at different tech such as PoS. | Although this might have just been a fun project someone put | together in which case nice job. | marsven_422 wrote: | Like "x% of crypto runs on green energy" this is a irrelevant | argument. | | The energy could have been put to better uses. | JohnGB wrote: | You've left out PeerCoin (PPC) the original PoW cryptocurrency | which has been in constant operation and development since 2013. | It is by far the most energy efficient, as that was one of the | main goals in the design of PeerCoin. | everfree wrote: | Original PoS cryptocurrency, I think you mean. | mudlus wrote: | This chart is nice, but you need to include the difficulty of the | algorithm (difficulty to attack), the size of the blockchain | (hard for anyone except rich people to participate if you need a | server farm just to verify a transaction), developer activity, | and each coin should have a collapsable subset of "layer-2" | options (eg. Lightning and liquid for Bitcoin), and their | statistics as well. | | Most importantly, A "transaction" on a blockchain is not a | "transaction" in the colloquial sense. | crazypython wrote: | Note that Bitcoin SV is completely controlled by miners, a 51% | attack can change the rules. In the original Bitcoin, a 51% | attack can only reverse recent transactions, not change the rules | or compromise stored funds. | dudewhat1 wrote: | Yea if you want to spend millions if not billions to 51% attack | it and the public nature of bitcoin is such that everyone would | know who attacked it leaving them legally liable then be my | guest. There is more incentive not to attack it than there is | to attack it. when will people realize this. | pmorici wrote: | Bitcoin SV was the result of a sociopath who lied about being | Satoshi Nakamoto and supporters of Bitcoin core encouraged it | because it fit their political goals. | Pauldb8 wrote: | There is a lot of ignorance going around here. Bitcoin SV is | cheaper because it can handle vastly more transactions per block, | making it more efficient. Bitcoin SV believes in unrestricted | scalability. Yes mostly this means miners will tend to | agglomerate, and specialize I to big data center. Well know | public entities that must follow law. but we believe all miners | also have an incentive to not let any other gros past 50%. Today | none is more than 38%, so we're safe. And also we have had big | blocks with hundred of thousand of transaction. these block | generate a lot of transaction fee, sometimes more than the mining | reward ! Which we all know will decrease over time, to only rely | on tx fee. Which BSV embraces. The node has been worked on to | support Tera Node, with Tera Block, and billions of tx, the world | of tomorrow, the enterprise grade blockchain. Yes indeed it's | more environmental friendly to be more efficient. | wmf wrote: | Txs / MWh is not a valid metric for most cryptocurrencies since | power consumption is proportional to price, not transactions. | | Also, BSV and BCH are totally insecure so it's not really fair to | compare them to secure cryptocurrencies. | qeternity wrote: | Of course it's a valid metric. The whole point of this is that | most crypto is not used to transact, but to speculate, and so a | high price and therefore high carbon footprint with a low | transaction throughput is often the whole point of these | analyses. | shawnz wrote: | Transactions aren't the only thing which makes | cryptocurrencies useful, and even then, cryptocurrency | transactions aren't directly comparable to each other or to | transactions in traditional financial systems since they can | have a much different risk profile. | | Furthermore it's not obvious that increased transaction rates | are necessary yet in most cryptocurrencies and so it might | not make sense to optimize for that yet. There is no point | encouraging frivolous data to be added to the blockchain | permanently if the demand to make useful transactions isn't | there yet. | pmorici wrote: | It's proportional to the value a miner is awarded (ie: block | reward + transaction fess) for mining a block not the price of | the coin. Saying it is the price of the coin is like saying | Berkshire Hathaway is worth more than Apple because their share | price is a lot higher. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-05-16 23:00 UTC)