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Bitcoin Power

Ethereum Staking Will Drop Power Consumption By 99% (cryptobriefing.com) 195

Posted by BeauHD from the Elon-are-you-listening? dept.
After Ethereum transitions to proof-of-stake, the blockchain's power consumption is expected to drop by more than 99%, making it about 7,000 times more energy efficient than Bitcoin. Crypto Briefing reports: Ethereum will reduce its energy consumption by 99.95% following its transition to proof-of-stake, according to a new blog post from Carl Beekhuizen of the Ethereum Foundation. Beekhuizen estimated there are 87,000 at-home stakers using about 100W of energy for a total of 1.64 megawatts. Additionally, there are another 52,700 exchanges and custodial services that use about 100W per 5.5 validators for a total of 0.98 megawatts. Based on those estimates, Beekhuizen says that Ethereum will consume about 2.62 megawatts when it switches to proof-of-stake.

Beekhuizen added that this estimate may be too large. He noted that his own personal staking setup was optimized to use 15W, while some staking services use as little as 5W per validator. This means that Ethereum will no longer use the energy equivalent of a country or even a city. Instead, its total consumption will be comparable to a small town that contains around 2100 homes.
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Ethereum Staking Will Drop Power Consumption By 99% More

Ethereum Staking Will Drop Power Consumption By 99%

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  • Can someone reply with the definition

    • Re:Proof of stake defined nowhere (Score:5, Informative)

      by Ostracus ( 1354233 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @09:00PM (#61398614) Journal

      Proof-of-stake. [wikipedia.org]

    • Re:Proof of stake defined nowhere (Score:5, Interesting)

      by GameboyRMH ( 1153867 ) <gameboyrmh AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @09:48PM (#61398716) Journal

      It means the people who have more coins get more coins because they have more say in verifying the ledger. Basically "the rich get richer" becomes a feature of the currency itself.

      This may sound stupider than proof-of-work purely from a currency perspective, but all cryptocurrencies are already so deep in stupidity that it's a relatively small difference, and at least this will be much easier on the environment.

      • Re:Proof of stake defined nowhere (Score:5, Insightful)

        by joe_frisch ( 1366229 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @10:18PM (#61398778)
        Its a great feature if you already own Etherium and are hoping others will buy in. It makes the pyramid just a little pointier.

      • Proof of Stake, as pioneered by Peercoin in 2012, does not make the rich richer, it just means inflation. No matter how much coin you hold, it grows with the same percentage for everyone. This traditional and fair system has been adopted to newer coins such as Zano, but Peercoin is also being actively maintained. If you've been worried about the environmental impact of cryptocurrencies, you've had Peercoin for almost a decade now.

        Unfortunately, some cryptocurrencies also have a "rich get richer" version

    • Re:Proof of stake defined nowhere (Score:5, Interesting)

      by cornfeedhobo ( 6270348 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @10:21PM (#61398786)

      No problem.

      Proof of Stake is a consensus mechanism that uses a user's holdings as the validator for transactions in the mempool that are to be written to blocks.

      This is in contrast to the original design of Proof of Work, where each party competes to find a matching hash for validation.

      While I'm giving this ELI5, I'd like to throw in one point that is often not discussed: the impacts to economics. Consider that the cost to "mine" is now tied to how much currency is "staking" (locked up and immovable). This causes a distorted market effect that incentives hording worse than bitcoin has ever seen. The long tail effect of this is likely that 1% will own 90% of the currency. For contrast, we know that other PoS coins average at 70% of coins staking, leaving 30% for real economic activity. It doesn't take an economics degree to see how this is a bad idea from the start.

      • Well, if "bad idea from the start" was a concern, none of this would have gotten off the ground in the first place. It's not as if "real economic activity" is especially important for bitcoin.

    • Essentially you mine by having money. It's even more obvious that this is a bad idea as it skips the "buying stuff" phase directly.

  • The Cost of Horsepowertricity. (Score:5, Funny)

    by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @08:39PM (#61398586)

    Ethereum will no longer use the energy equivalent of a country or even a city. Instead, its total consumption will be comparable to a small town that contains around 2100 homes.

    We still try and measure our electric cars using horses for a power metric, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised when the power standards for cryptocoin are measured in small towns.

    Anybody got change for a gas station? All I have is a hotel and two parking garages...

    • I have a hotel on boardwalk and four houses on park place.

    • To be fair, they give the figures in Watts first, and only tack on the "power of a small town" at the end.

      Rule-of-thumb: A typical American home uses roughly a kilowatt of electrical power.

      • Rule-of-thumb: A typical American home uses roughly a kilowatt of electrical power.
        Rule-of-thumb: without a time period that sentence makes no sense. Or do you want to imply it is 24 kWh per day? That sounds even for american standards exagerated.

        • It makes perfect sense without a time unit since the standard unit for power is the watt.

          BTW, 24 kWh / day is mathematically equivalent to 1 kW, just more confusing.

          • Nope, for normal people the other way is more confusing.

            As 24kWh is the scaled equivalent of gallons.

            24kW is the equivalent how far you open the valve to let gasoline through.

            Gallons make sense, Gallons per hour make sense. The valve opened so far "call it 3/3rd open" that it is equivalent to 4 gallons per hour, without mentioning 4 gallons per hour: makes no sense.

            Especially as a house/flat is not constantly pulling 1kW ... it is fluctuating. So: either mention total gallons, or total kWh, like everyone do

            • Alternative “units” make sense when people cannot understand the order of magnitude and that is what is relevant. Very few people would relate to just how much energy is 9.5TWh, but if I say that is about the energy output of a nuclear power plant over the course of a year then the sense of scale sets in. It makes more of a difference when consumption or production is not flat, like the 28.5GWh that a 5MW wind turbine would produce in a year.

            • Admit it: You didn't know that W*h/d is dimensionally equivalent to W. Otherwise, you wouldn't have said that it "makes no sense".

              There's no need to retroactively try to justify your mistake.

        • At 24kWh per day, It does sound excessive to non-Americans.

          But the typical American house uses more like 30kWh per day... [google.com] So it's actually an underestimate.

          • Wow, that is an absurd high amount, I doubt I even use 3kWh a day. Would need to find my last bill to check exactly.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by stooo ( 2202012 )

      >> We still try and measure our electric cars using horses for a power metric
      Nope. In metric we measure EVs in kW and kWh units, not in horses, camels, or kangaroos per inch square.

      • Nope. In metric we measure EVs in kW and kWh units, not in horses, camels, or kangaroos per inch square.

        Depends.
        In the UK, metric horsepower is usually used along with metric power.
        You'll usually see it in the form of %dPS (%dkW)
        Sometimes you'll even see shit so painful it makes your brain bleed: %fkWh / %d miles

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      We still try and measure our electric cars using horses for a power metric

      1 horsepower = 750W.

      But depending on your country, car engines are often listed in both horsepower and kilowatts (kW). EVs are rated the same way to keep the units familiar.

      It's why EVs also state their mileage in MPGe - miles per gallon equivalent, though the metric unit is W/100m, usually stated as kW/100km (same figure, because of redundant multiplier), though I believe it's also equated back to le/100km (litres-equivalent/100km).

  • Good. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @08:49PM (#61398598)

    I don't care about anything cryptocurrency centric but I care about radically reducing power consumption from cryptocurrency. Too much is at stake to be expending electricity on meaningless calculations.

    • Too much is at stake to be expending electricity on meaningless calculations.

      That's a lot of meaningless calculations. [cnbc.com]

      • The calculations themselves are meaningless in part because of how absurdly redundant they are. Also, stop conflating perceived value with intrinsic value.

    • Re:Good. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Richard_at_work ( 517087 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @09:19PM (#61398658)

      I agree about the power consumption, but whats the downside here?

      Given someone above posted a link to the definition of "proof-of-stake" above, which basically says "rather than mining with artificial difficulty, you must have a quantity of tokens already to be trusted in the network as a transaction validator", which raises a few questions in my mind (and Im betting theres a paper someone can point me to):

      1. Does this make participation in the validation process mainly eligible only for an elite group, those willing to both purchase large quantities of tokens *and* hold on to them?

      2. Will the act of having to possess a stake in the currency itself do anything to stabilise a currency?

      3. Will this move allow attacks on the currency to simply become a case of someone buying lots of currency to become a trusted validator?

      • Honestly, I don't care even if it all falls apart.

      • Re:Good. (Score:4, Informative)

        by jonored ( 862908 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @09:56PM (#61398734)

        Generally there's some mechanism whereby you can "delegate" your tokens to allow someone else to validate, with the expectation that they pay you some of the profit from validating as interest, so it's less about having a lot of money and more about having a lot of trust represented by people choosing to delegate to you.

        I don't think it'll particularly stabilize or destabilize the currency much, apart from breaking (thankfully) the connection to "how much power and how many GPUs can you buy with that". That was already not an even exchange, else it wouldn't have made any financial sense to go into mining.

        In terms of attacks, you can generally detect whether a validator is misbehaving, and a misbehaving validator gets actively penalized; I don't know whether ethereum is going to use slashing, but it's not uncommon to allow another node to _confiscate_ the deposit a validator made if they can prove misbehavior - for instance, if the validator signed two different versions of the same block, the way they would if attempting to double spend. In general you also need more than one validator to make an attack feasible, so it's not so much "buy a lot", it's "buy more than half of all ethereum in existence", and then you can keep an attack going for a little while, before other nodes on the network confiscate all of that ether and you've lost more money than Jeff Bezos' net worth.

      • You can think of this in terms of making the cryptocurrency more tradition. To answer your questions with an obvious comparison:

        1. Yes, someone who has stake needs to be the trusted party to validate the currency. Kind of like a government central bank, ... except lots of much smaller central banks. In theory here anyone can participate not just the elite, but a consensus must be reached between lots of small players to be as trustworthy as that of a larger player. Think: multiple credit unions agreeing wit

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by geekmux ( 1040042 )

      Too much is at stake to be expending electricity on meaningless calculations.

      Yeah, maybe you're right.

      I mean, just think of the valued addicts, each of them losing potentially thousands of pew-pew clicks and billions of GPU cycles to mining instead of gaming.

      All those pesky millionaires Bitcoin is creating instead.

      What a waste.

      PS. Wanna know how we take the planet green in AOC time? Put in place a global mandate tied to the climate accord that all cryptocurrency must be mined using renewable energy. If Greed wants to fucking gorge in the 21st Century, s-he-it should be forced to d

      • Why not use all that green energy to replace dirty energy instead?
        • Because this planet literally collects enough sunlight to run a Kardashev 1 to Kardashev 2 civilization. There is vastly more than enough to do both.

          • Because this planet literally collects enough sunlight to run a Kardashev 1 to Kardashev 2 civilization. There is vastly more than enough to do both.

            Sure. And until such times as we have enough solar panels. Don't waste the solar and cause excess burring of coal and gas for no good reason.

          • Because this planet literally collects enough sunlight to run a Kardashev 1 to Kardashev 2 civilization. There is vastly more than enough to do both.

            The planet, has plenty of money too, and yet people still die of poverty.

            Solve for the Disease of Greed first. It's only been afflicting mankind for a few thousand years. Oh, and if you don't solve for it, we're most likely going to die right here on this rock that's trying to kill the human infection anyway.

            No pressure. Good luck.

      • Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by MrL0G1C ( 867445 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2021 @02:27AM (#61399182) Journal

        Gamers don't stick 6 GPU's in a case and then run a room full of cases. Gamers don't run their GPU 24/7.

        those pesky millionaires Bitcoin is creating instead.

        Those millionaires aren't created by bitcoin, they are created by gullible fools and hedge funds pouring money in to buying into the bitcoin pyramid scheme. And I'm not a fan of increasing wealth inequality either.

        And renewable energy doesn't have zero carbon footprint, it just has a lower carbon footprint, the ideal carbon footprint is currently less than zero. So the best option is for crypto-currencies not to use electricity. And like the other poster said if you use renewables to mine then preventing the use of those renewables to displace fossil fuel use.

        Currently the only thing mainstream cryptocurrencies are suitable for is money laundering, speculation (gambling) and buying illegal goods/services, otherwise there are far quicker and more efficient systems in place for holding and transferring money.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

      > Too much is at stake to be expending electricity on meaningless

      Aren't Google, Youtube and Netflix like 80% of all internet traffic?! May as well become Amish.

      • Watching a flick online uses a lot less energy than driving to a theater.

        • Re:Good. (Score:4, Insightful)

          by NFN_NLN ( 633283 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @11:30PM (#61398918)

          Sounds like you think you're entitled to entertainment. Maybe you should think green by sitting in a chair and looking off into the distance.

          • Sounds like you think you're entitled to entertainment. Maybe you should think green by sitting in a chair and looking off into the distance.

            A chair? Such extravagance.
            You can't appease the climate Gods like that.

      • Aren't Google, Youtube and Netflix like 80% of all internet traffic?!

        Yes, but that's a misleading characterization.
        They're 80% by volume (which makes sense, since "using" youtube is basically downloading, constantly, as opposed to short sessions with gaps in between)
        Flow wise, the Big Video providers aren't even a quarter.
        The rest is all short-lived connections bouncing off of CDNs.

        So, in volume- yes. They internet basically exists to serve them at this point.
        But in terms of actual discrete connections made? No. They're nowhere close.

    • Have we not already proved that increasing efficiency increases overall use in a greater than proportional response as a general rule?

      If you wanted to reduce the amount of electricity consumed my Ethereum, you would make it more electricity hungy, not less.

      • Have we not already proved that increasing efficiency increases overall use in a greater than proportional response as a general rule?

        I do not believe we have. Instead I think we've proved that miners will increase the amount of mining they do which in this model will not scale to the entire network.

        If you wanted to reduce the amount of electricity consumed my Ethereum, you would make it more electricity hungy, not less.

        We shall have to wait and see.

    • The Jevons Paradox [wikipedia.org] and the Rebound Effect [wikipedia.org]

  • The concept is not explained in a way that I can understand. They say you need 32 eth (about $100K) to become a validator. Does proof of stake mean that if you own etherium you earn more etherium by verifying transactions? They say validators are chosen randomly, but can a single person run many validators? How are more etherium coins created? I'm probably just slow. I assume the people who have invested half a trillion dollars in etherium understand this.

  • Now the more ETH the you have, the more you will get? IE: the rich gets richer?

  • They've been talking about this for a couple years haven't they?
  • though, or it's done.

    MEV (miner-extractable-value) is clearly nothing but financial corruption (theft) at the core of the transaction network. Ethereum will never ever be accepted as central financial infrastructure with that crap going on.
  • The question of delegated trust is a solved issue - PKI firmly established what it takes to maintain secure Certificate Authority. Translating such system into Transaction Processing Authority is not a difficult task. You don't need to tie 'proof of work' to transactions, you can tie 'proof of work' to something that is a lot more static, such as ledger of Transaction Processing Authorities.

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