[HN Gopher] Ethereum Energy Consumption
___________________________________________________________________
Ethereum Energy Consumption
Author : pshc
Score : 53 points
Date : 2022-07-02 21:38 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ethereum.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (ethereum.org)
| flipbrad wrote:
| Is it fanciful to hope this could - in and of itself - allow
| several polluting power stations to be decommissioned, and/or
| appreciably reduce energy prices for the rest of us?
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| A quick look at https://whattomine.com/ shows that several
| altcoins are within 70% profitability of mining Ethereum.
|
| That math is going to change as the Ethereum miners reconfigure
| for altcoins and the difficulties change, but the bottom line
| is that mining will continue as long as some coin is still
| profitable to mine.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| I've read that a lot of former ETH miners have sold or are
| planning to sell their rigs (I think this is related to the
| submission yesterday about the GPU shortage being over[1], as
| Ethereum is usually mined on GPUs)
|
| We'll see if it plays out, but cryptocurrency prices falling
| have certainly reduced the energy consumption as well (it
| becomes less profitable to mine at a given difficulty when
| your mining reward is worth less).
|
| If Ethereum does eventually manage to overtake Bitcoin,
| that'll bode well for crypto's energy footprint in the long
| term (fingers crossed for this happening, or at least for
| there to not be another Bitcoin/PoW bubble)
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31953662
| xur17 wrote:
| But Ethereum mining rewards are orders of magnitude greater
| than the mining rewards for all of the altcoins (combined).
| The attack cost on this page [0] is a good reference for the
| relative mining incentive.
|
| Given this, a LOT of mining capacity is going to go offline
| when this occurs.
|
| [0] https://www.crypto51.app/
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| And altcoins are a lot riskier too. They tend to come and
| fall out of favour.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| It's not that significant in the grand scheme of things. Even
| if BTC disappeared, your electricity bill would not be
| noticeably cheaper.
| woodruffw wrote:
| This is probably true. The first part of the GP's post (about
| unnecessary pollution) does apply however.
| everfree wrote:
| Edit: Never mind, my calculations were definitely wrong.
| notahacker wrote:
| A terawatt is a trillion watts (or a billion kilowatts), so
| no, you're out by 3 orders of magnitude and Ethereum ceasing
| to use PoW would be the equivalent of losing the need for
| 30-40 typical coal power plants (or a handful of the world's
| largest coal power plants)
| elromulous wrote:
| Something here it not computing. They said Ethereum energy
| consumption is similar to the Netherlands. This would mean a
| single coal planet can power the Netherlands 35 times over.
| Some numbers are definitely wrong here.
| keishebmdod wrote:
| 3.5 billion kWh = 3.5 TWh, not 3500 TWh
| patrickyeon wrote:
| Not at all. 3.5 Billion kWh is 3.5 TWh.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Those numbers don't look right. A plant running at 90% uptime
| is ~8000 h/yr, and a typical large power plant produces 100s
| of MW. So you should be looking at a yearly output in ~1000s
| GWh/yr range.
| christiangenco wrote:
| I'm surprised to see Paypal only uses 0.26 TWh/yr (compared to
| Bitcoin's 200 TWh/yr and Ethereum's 112 TWh/yr) which includes
| their offices and data centers[1].
|
| I've heard the argument that if you take into account all the
| human-associated energy costs Bitcoin's energy use compared to a
| company like Visa would be comparable. Now I'm not so sure.
|
| Notably this 0.26 TWh/yr number doesn't include things like the
| energy used by each human to drive to and from work or the amount
| of energy needed to make the food that fed them that year but now
| we're getting into some anti-human territory.
|
| Perhaps the goal shouldn't be to minimize energy use but to
| maximize energy output.
|
| 1. https://app.impaakt.com/analyses/paypal-
| consumed-264100-mwh-...
| dale_glass wrote:
| Why is it surprising?
|
| Paypal and any other company is interested in efficiency.
| Servers, air conditioning and power all cost quite serious
| amounts of money. UPSes and backup generators have to be sized
| for the load. Bringing large amounts of power into a building
| is also non-trivial. All of this means that most companies want
| to be reasonably efficient.
|
| If Paypal found that their needs are covered by half the
| servers, leading to shutting down half their datacenters,
| they'd be quite happy about it. Plus less wages to pay!
|
| Proof of Work on the other hand intrinsically wastes power. If
| somebody made a 2X more efficient ASIC/GPU, that'd mean that
| mining is now cheaper, which means you can do twice of it,
| which means that quickly everyone scales up and power usage
| remains the same.
| toolz wrote:
| It's not fair to just say [financial institutions power
| consumption] vs bitcoin as financial institutions do not
| protect their assets. Governments with militaries protect the
| fiat assets and the power consumption of a military strength
| necessary to stabilize a fiat currency might be substantial.
| CamelCaseName wrote:
| But, governments with militaries also protect crypto assets.
| Like when the DOJ went after Frosties founders, or more
| recently, SK and Do Kwon. There's also the CFTC and the SEC
| fighting over who will regulate the space.
|
| Even the most charitable argument, that crypto-relieved folks
| are trying to get governments involved.
| toolz wrote:
| Of course, that's why it's muddy on how you should compare
| the energy costs. Bitcoins energy costs are 99.9% related
| to protecting the asset, they are not related to the
| functionality of the system.
|
| Likewise financial systems have little to do with
| protecting fiat, banks are backed by governments businesses
| like paypal hold money in banks, etc.
|
| So to compare bitcoins energy consumption to an entity that
| spend energy in an unrelated way isn't entirely fair -
| there is some merit there, but not much.
| lottin wrote:
| What do you mean "fiat assets"?
| toolz wrote:
| I mean that fiat is always issues by a central authority.
| To be a trusted/stable central authority you need power,
| which is usually represented by military strength (either
| your own or the strength of your allies).
|
| You do not get stable fiat without a trusted central
| authority and you do not get a trusted central authority
| without military power.
| lottin wrote:
| Do you mean that private property is enforced by
| violence? How else do you expect to enforce it?
|
| By the way, bitcoin is also "fiat", in the sense that it
| isn't backed by anything (this is what "fiat" means).
| toolz wrote:
| > By the way, bitcoin is also "fiat", in the sense that
| it isn't backed by anything (this is what "fiat" means).
|
| That's not what fiat means in any sense. It has latin
| origins for "let it be done" which is to say that it is a
| decree by an authoritative actor.
|
| But both bitcoin and fiat are backed by something -
| bitcoin is backed by a lot of energy consumption and fiat
| is backed by government authority.
|
| > Do you mean that private property is enforced by
| violence? How else do you expect to enforce it?
|
| I don't expect it to be enforced any other way, I didn't
| mean to give the impression that bitcoin was somehow free
| from the necessity of enforcing private property.
| However, bitcoin is different in that you only need to
| protect people and the network, with fiat you have much
| more to protect, such as political positions of power and
| physical buildings like fort knox.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| That protection applies to the people and other assets,
| too...
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > I've heard the argument that if you take into account all the
| human-associated energy costs Bitcoin's energy use compared to
| a company like Visa would be comparable. Now I'm not so sure.
|
| The amount of misinformation around crypto energy usage has
| been out of control in the past few years. It's still weird to
| dip into an HN comment section and see people spreading the
| false claim that mining is powered by renewable energy sources
| that would otherwise go to waste (an absurd claim on every
| level) or that Bitcoin is somehow a "store of energy". The
| extreme energy inefficiency of cryptocurrencies is well-
| documented and doesn't even come close to any other financial
| system.
|
| > Perhaps the goal shouldn't be to minimize energy use but to
| maximize energy output.
|
| The real goal is to minimize harmful emissions. If we had some
| hypothetical infinite clean energy source then mining wouldn't
| be a big deal. However, even when mining is colocated with
| renewable energy sources, that renewable energy is prevented
| from going into the grid and offsetting fossil-fuel power
| plants.
| peyton wrote:
| > that renewable energy is prevented from going into the grid
| and offsetting fossil-fuel power plants
|
| I'm not sure that's how energy markets work... do you have
| any further reading? I've heard generally miners buy the
| cheapest electricity possible--typically oversupply that
| would otherwise be curtailed.
|
| I don't understand why Bitcoin mining is incompatible with
| emissions reduction. It sounds like an additional source of
| demand may make economical plants that otherwise could not be
| built.
| orwin wrote:
| The thing that the "oversupply" can go into a PSPS, or you
| can just turn off pulsed coal or oil production facilities
| (if you have a national leadership over energy production
| and distribution, it won't work in Texas)
| nathanvanfleet wrote:
| People working on crypto also drive around and do things? Which
| would make the crypto numbers equally larger. It would
| presumably take as many humans to run a kind of crypto-Visa as
| it would take to run regular Visa. Crypto isn't somehow
| automating some human-intensive activity. The big numbers on
| crypto is just the algo costs. So your whole argument is kind
| of terrible?
| jcranmer wrote:
| You shouldn't be so surprised. The energy consumption issues of
| cryptocurrency are very well-known, and the claims that "you
| didn't take into account all the human office staff" were
| attempts to deflect discussion from this energy consumption,
| almost certainly made by nobody who ever attempted to crunch
| any numbers. (The last time I tried crunched the numbers, I
| noted that Bitcoin uses more energy than the US mint making
| literal physical currency in industrial processes, and that was
| with heavy overestimation of the energy consumption of the
| latter.)
|
| Believing that taking into account human-associated energy
| costs would put them on rough parity would require assuming
| that computers take up 1/1000th the total energy costs. And
| that's before you actually look at how many human jobs would
| actually disappear were cryptocurrency to magically replace the
| financial industry.
| MatthiasPortzel wrote:
| I think Ethereum is pretty cool, generally, but there are two
| downsides this post doesn't address.
|
| The first is that there's still no date for The Merge beyond
| "expected to happen in the second half of 2022."
|
| Secondly, the Ethereum organization can only ask people nicely to
| stop mining the POW version of the coin. It's possible that the
| current version of the Ethereum blockchain will continue to
| progress, like Ether Classic has, albeit at a greatly reduced
| value.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Although validator earnings will be single digit percentages in
| ether per year, isn't that just the block reward, and all of the
| transaction fees are also split?
|
| With higher throughput, more strategies that once again saturate
| the block space, that could be more lucrative than it seems?
| Sargos wrote:
| > Although validator earnings will be single digit percentages
| in ether per year, isn't that just the block reward, and all of
| the transaction fees are also split?
|
| Don't forget about MEV (maximum extractable value). Block
| producers can front run your trades and do other interesting
| stuff to about 6% extra a year using something like flashbots.
| jonathan-adly wrote:
| Citing Digiconomist numbers is really undermining the credibility
| of this article. de Vries's work has been debunked and shown to
| be garbage literally every time he publishes something (he is a
| low-level EU central banker, so not really a great authority).
|
| If you want to use something, this is much more credible from
| Cambridge University (showing radically different numbers):
| https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index
|
| For an example on what digiconmist gets wrong (there are many!):
| https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/not-science-digiconomis...
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| As I write this comment, the Digiconomist estimates for the
| Bitcoin network is 129.74 TWh
|
| The Cambridge University estimate for the Bitcoin network is
| 92.93 TWh with a lower bound of 51.01 TWh and an upper bound of
| 153.61 TWh. (I don't see an Ethereum comparison on the
| Cambridge site, so I can't check those numbers)
|
| Given that the Digiconomist estimate is within the bounds of
| the Cambridge estimate, I don't see how this is really a
| debunking. I'm not really inclined to put too much faith into
| an article from "Bitcoin Magazine" on the topic when a quick
| look at the numbers shows that the two primary sources don't
| really disagree and have similar estimates.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Give them their semantic difference, it's all Bitcoin maxis
| have had to fight the absurd numbers for a while.
| jonathan-adly wrote:
| CNBC is better?
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/no-bitcoin-is-likely-not-
| goi...
| lottin wrote:
| I was expecting something a little more academic.
| colesantiago wrote:
| Keep in mind this is all hypothetical and these numbers are not
| based in any reality. The foundation cites a random wordpress
| blog on these numbers. (really?)
|
| Even if this merge is done, a greener pyramid scheme doesn't
| change anything about the speculators and scams that Ethereum
| harbours as Ethereum becomes even more centralised and
| plutocratic.
|
| Gas fee surges will always still be a problem after the merge
| which only favours the rich that can afford them making Ethereum
| useless at scale for on chain usecases.
| woodruffw wrote:
| > Ethereum's energy consumption will be reduced by ~99.95%
| following The Merge from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake
| (PoS). After The Merge, Ethereum will use dramatically less
| carbon to be more secure.
|
| How many years has it been, at this point? I distinctly recall
| "imminent" plans to switch over to PoS as early as 2019.
| nootropicat wrote:
| That's incorrect. There were plans to switch to hybrid PoS in
| 2018 which were (surprisingly even to Parity node devs) rapidly
| shelved. Since then a new design is being slowly worked upon.
| There were no plans to switch in 2019 that I recall.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Surely someone has made a graph analyzing the trend line of
| projected PoS switch date compared to the current date, a la
| https://xkcd.com/2014/... where might I find such a graph?
| garren wrote:
| > The Merge, Ethereum will use dramatically less carbon to be
| more secure.
|
| How is "[using] dramatically less carbon" more secure? What are
| the security implications?
|
| > Since its inception, Ethereum has aimed to implement a proof-
| of-stake consensus mechanism, but doing this without
| sacrificing security and decentralization has taken years of
| focused research and development.
|
| A rather notable criticism of PoS, and its variations, is that
| it /does/ sacrifice decentralization to achieve its aims. I
| know that much smarter people than me have been working on
| this, and I don't follow research into consensus algos super
| closely, but I haven't heard or read anything validating PoS as
| the silver bullet it's made out to be.
| ntoskrnl wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210806101020/https://spectrum....
|
| According to this, the PoS schedule first slipped in 2017.
| (search for "snooze button")
| dabeeeenster wrote:
| Why is this being downvoted?!
| woodruffw wrote:
| I'd also like to know. It's an honest question, and I don't
| see why we should evaluate Ethereum's power consumption based
| on an unrealized scheme that's been promised (and left
| undelivered) for years.
| ChrisClark wrote:
| Because the final steps are finally being performed. Just
| because something has taken a long time, doesn't mean it
| will never be done. There is nothing more to be done now
| except the actual final step of the merge.
|
| The latest test merges have gone very well, but when you're
| dealing with something this valuable, you do a lot of
| tests, just to be sure.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Okay. I can appreciate the need for caution and careful
| direction when making significant changes to a financial
| scheme.
|
| What I recall is a number of public announcements over
| the years claiming that the PoS transition was imminent,
| only to have it delayed at the last moment. That kind of
| repeated whiplash is not confidence inspiring, either
| from a design or a community standpoint. Is there a
| reason to expect this time to be different?
| [deleted]
| olalonde wrote:
| Because this comment is basically copy/pasted in every HN
| article about Ethereum[0]. It doesn't add anything to the
| conversation and is extremely repetitive. A bit like the
| "generics in Go" comments on every Go article until they were
| implemented.
|
| [0] Not even 24 hours ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31954276
| aspyct wrote:
| A scam, like everything else in crypto land.
| jhhh wrote:
| Funny enough if you click through to find out what 'The Merge'
| is you get a 404.
| moffkalast wrote:
| At this point they should consider rebasing instead, clearly
| there's too many conflicts.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| The linked article does mention that work towards the
| transition has effectively been in progress since before
| Ethereum even launched.
|
| If you're talking about when it started being claimed that it
| was happening soon, the beacon chain launched at the end of
| 2020, so probably 2019/2020 sometime.
| lottin wrote:
| This is from a year ago:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27194586
|
| They keep making the same announcement every few months.
| scrose wrote:
| The last time I bought ethereum was around 2016/2017 when there
| were heavy talks of proof-of-stake coming soon.
| matt2000 wrote:
| It's very healthy to be skeptical. I'm no expert but the
| current status appears to be a successful test of the merge on
| a public testnet and an expectation that it will happen on
| mainnet in the next few months. More details here:
| https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/merge/ and a prediction market
| on the actual date it will happen here:
| https://polymarket.com/market-group/ethereum-merge-pos
| progrus wrote:
| I don't trust proof of stake, mostly because loads of people who
| I consider irrational _want_ it to work so desperately.
|
| Proof-of-work actually does work - it is no longer a debate, and
| these people (many of the same people who were saying "b-b-but
| tulips" a couple years ago) can't stand it. I wouldn't trust any
| of them to engineer their way out of a paper bag.
|
| Capitalism is winning again, folks. Deal with it.
| jimmysong wrote:
| Proof-of-Stake doesn't solve the Byzantine General's Problem.
| Therefore, the system no longer has the property of being able to
| get decentralized consensus
| ChrisClark wrote:
| I think you're way too deep in the maximalist culture to
| actually see reality for what it is, Jimmy.
| jakear wrote:
| What a magnificent joke that their "The Merge" link 404's.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| It's amazing to compare the energy consumption of a network where
| the all time high of total worldwide transactions in a 24 hour
| period is 1.7 million. Compared to the entire energy consumption
| of a country (Netherlands) with a population of 18 million
| people.
|
| Just incredible.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| But when is this merge happening? There is still no date as far
| as I can see? It's been happening "soon" for years now :(
|
| I really hope it takes off though, because if crypto is here to
| stay it really should stop wasting so much energy. We'll never
| solve the climate crisis this way.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| https://Wenmerge.com
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Ah interesting.. So "the merge" is pending some kind of
| blockchain activity? Like an X number of blocks mined?
|
| I thought it was just an arbitrary decision saying "We'll
| merge on date X".
| Dzugaru wrote:
| > Ethereum will use dramatically less carbon to be more secure
|
| Why is that? PoS security model is fundamentally different from
| PoW - for instance - you cannot determine which of the two chains
| is "correct" anymore, you have to consult "a friend" [0]. That's
| not the case in Bitcoin, where the correct chain is simply the
| longest.
|
| All PoS algos are very complex and have a ton of seemingly
| bandaid solutions for various problems that arise when you can
| create alternate histories freely (even if you use VDFs I think),
| and there is a disturbing lack of critique on that. So, why is it
| seen as "more secure"?
|
| [0] https://yanmaani.github.io/proof-of-stake-is-a-scam-and-
| the-...
| Glench wrote:
| I understand Proof of Stake to be much more centralized and prone
| to takeovers than proof of work. So if the merge ever actually
| happens, it would fix the energy consumption issue at the trade-
| off of security (staking, aka rich get richer).
|
| I'm much more bullish on Chia and proof-of-space/time -- same
| nakamato consensus as proof-of-work without the energy
| consumption: https://chiapower.org/ Also helps that Chia can be
| farmed from a raspberry pi or similarly low-performance device,
| making it so there are over 100k farmers around the world
| currently.
| colesantiago wrote:
| So we should allow Chia to waste tons disk drives instead as a
| consensus mechanism?
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Is chia the one that doesn't burn through hard drives? Or is
| that Sia.. I can't even remember any more.
|
| I don't think it's true that Proof is Stake is less resilient
| personally, of the 30-100 proof of stake chains that have been
| running for over a year now, I don't believe there have been
| any consensus attacks, and many of those would be far easier to
| attack (as the cost of doing so is relative to the market cap
| of the native coin)
|
| On the other hand, we _did_ see consolidation of >50% of the
| hashrate on Bitcoin, due to mining pools. That was only short-
| lived because the mining pool which accumulated that much
| hashrate agreed to cap it at 48% or something
| nootropicat wrote:
| >I understand Proof of Stake to be much more centralized and
| prone to takeovers than proof of work. So if the merge ever
| actually happens, it would fix the energy consumption issue at
| the trade-off of security (staking, aka rich get richer).
|
| The opposite is true, proof of work is hopelessly insecure and
| centralized. It's hopelessly insecure because resources needed
| to mine are external - so any attack by the only realistic
| adversary (ie. a state) is always just a question of resources,
| and the most pessimistic cost is in low billions of dollars.
| Realistically - America could already 51% bitcoin by forcing
| regulations on existing miners for nearly zero cost.
|
| It's also centralized because mining has infinite economies of
| scale. Bitcoin mining started with hobbyists mining on home
| pcs, now there are companies buying power plants just to mine.
| This only makes it easier for governments to control.
|
| The only reason no big PoW coins were successfully attacked is
| because there's no clear motivation for anyone - nothing in the
| real world relies on any cryptocurrency to continue existing.
| The only realistic attack would be to try to exchange tokens on
| the attacked PoW network for tokens on another - which is
| easily done for low 9 figs, but becomes increasingly hard
| afterwards - making any attack uneconomical. On top of that
| there are legal issues - it's very possible a 51% double
| spending attack would be legally treated as theft.
|
| This all changes completely the moment major countries and
| corporations go down if some blockchain goes down. Imagine Iran
| defaulting if bitcoin or ethereum gets taken over in a 51% PoW
| attack, with all transactions from Iran addresses censored. It
| would be orders of magnitudes cheaper than any serious military
| action. Fortunately for Iran and crypto holders that's not
| true. A significant adoption of a PoW network would end up in
| an inevitable disaster and potentially destroy any trust in
| cryptocurrencies forever.
|
| Of all invented consensus methods only proof of stake can
| survive in a truly hostile environment. No government can print
| eth at will to take over ethereum, and stakers can easily stay
| anonymous, unlike massive corporate miners.
|
| Bitcoin holders are very good at propaganda and pretending PoW
| is safe, which works as marketing, but wouldn't do anything
| against a real military incentive to take control over bitcoin.
|
| >I'm much more bullish on Chia and proof-of-space/time
|
| No, Chia has the same issue. Anything that relies on external
| resources as consensus votes is fundamentally insecure.
| nootropicat wrote:
| Energy use can be computed from first principles given some
| arbitrary assumptions: average power per node and number of
| nodes.
|
| There are ARM nodes that require less than 10W. Then there are
| more conventional servers that require ...150W? Average here is
| pure guesswork, but error bounds aren't that large - let's say
| 100W/node.
|
| How many nodes are going to exist - I think 10k is a reasonable
| maximum number.
|
| The result is 24000kWh per day. At $0.15/kWh, that means $3600 in
| daily energy costs.
|
| There's also the hardware cost itself and internet connection
| cost (which can be zero if there's an already paid for
| connection) - but all in all, total, real expenses to run
| ethereum become a rounding error of current ones. Guesstimating
| hw depreciation and connection cost, daily total at $5k
| translates into $1.825M/year. The value of block rewards during
| the last 24h is ~$15M.
|
| In other words resources required for running ethereum for ~3
| hours now are going to be enough to run it for a year after the
| merge.
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