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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

One thing that I rarely hear about crypto-currencies is the environmental impact. I am a bit surprised to see the environment-friendly silicon valley getting excited by such an energy-wasting protocol. If we have to burn CPUs reversing hashes every time someone makes a payment, we should start building new coal and nuclear power plants now.

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Ethereum is planning a switch from Proof of Work (burning CPU/GPU/ASIC cycles to secure the chain), to Delegated (?) Proof of Stake - people lock away some of their ETH holdings, some of those people are random selected to validate a block. They attest which transactions are valid, and put them in a block. If they're judged to be honest/correct they're rewarded with ETH in proportion to their stake. If they're found to have broken the rules their stake is not returned, or only partially returned.

PoS has detractors/claimed flaws, but it is definitely much less energy intensive than PoW.

Ethereum's moving to PBFT (Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant) Proof of Stake.

See this FAQ for more details, it has the most up to date details on Ethereum's PoS progress:

https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ

Ethereum's planned PoS is not delegated PoS. Instead, it is actually byzantine fault tolerant (and validators/stakers get punished for acting badly).

For example, if a current validator signs two blocks that conflict in any way (aka, creating two conflicting forks), they lose their deposit.

Also, many of the issues with PoS have effectively been addressed at this point (nothing at stake, stake grinding, etc). This comes with a compromise of weak subjectivity - namely, that when a user syncs a client for the first time, they have to start with a valid hash from w/in the past couple months that they trust.

After this initial starting point, as long as they sync their client every-so-often, no further trust is required.

This is one of the reasons that Vitalik wants to move towards Proof of Stake[1], which addresses the environmental impact of mining by not forcing computers to do complex crypto math to make the system work.

[1] https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/a-proof-of-stake-design-p...

Yea, even more so that mining is being dominated in countries with the cheapest electricity which are usually the worst in terms of environmentally friendly energy generation. Enjoy that Bitcoin, it contributed to the awful air quality in China.

>One thing that I rarely hear about crypto-currencies is the environmental impact

That's funny, it seems to be raised in every single hn cryptocurrency thread.

One thing I rarely see is a proper attempt to quantify co2 output. Electricity consumption is fairly well estimated, but environmental impact is not.

Would be interested to find one large industrial scale miner who actually has a negative impact on the scale that some talk about.

All the biggest I know of are located next to hydro dams and are 100% renewable.

It's rather naive to simply talk about electrity usage, nor all electricity is created equal.

There was an article about this recently - it basically said that your average ore mine(not even coal mine) uses as much energy per day as the entire bitcoin mining does for the whole year.

> One thing that I rarely hear about crypto-currencies is the environmental impact

How many Crypto threads does this exact comment have to be posted in before it stops becoming "rare" to hear about?

The whole point in Cryptos is they are fundamentally "backed" by the power of the network.

If it were trivial to compute the next block, there's not much value in the network and the coins.

I don't see how Crypto using electricity is any more wasteful than Google searches using electricity.

If Google used 100x more energy per search than Bing, would you consider it wasteful?

Now compare PoW against SCP.

What is SCP?

Stellar Consensus Protocol:

https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pd...

https://www.stellar.org/blog/stellar-consensus-protocol-proo...

The utility of the service is disproportionately minuscule in relation to the insane amount of resources in energy and hardware currently used for BTC or ETH.

For a database, with 3-4 transactions per second [1], and each transaction consuming the equivalent amount of energy to power 1.6 houses for a day [2] it begs the question of if and when a viable alternative arises that is more efficient at offering an improved service with less waste.

[1] https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions

[2] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/aek3za/bitcoin-co...

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ae3p7e/bitcoin-is...

Ethereum is going to move to proof of stake instead of proof of work and this will be magnitudes more energy efficient than proof of work.

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