[HN Gopher] Coin Carbon Cap - PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by ene...
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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.
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(page generated 2021-05-16 23:00 UTC)