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Comment by bogota | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Efficiency doesn't even make sense since mining can take up close to no, or infinite power.

The amount of energy a PoW coin uses entirely depends on the cost of electricity, hardware, and profitability. When a coin spikes in value, the profitability goes up so more miners join in. A single PC would have enough processing power to run the bitcoin network. All of this power usage goes towards solving useless tasks which get more difficult the more people there are trying to solve them.

If the coin's point is to become valuable to the point that people want it to trade it, then a PoW coin does have to require more overall compute power to crunch the numbers on the ever-increasing amount of transactions that might be attempting to double-spend on the chain. This is all because of PoW's lack of focus on efficiency when there is that much demand and that many transactions happening at once. Electricity, hardware, and profitability are all externalities that are the result by the amount of usage of a PoW coin, not the cause of it.

> When a coin spikes in value, the profitability goes up so more miners join in. A single PC would have enough processing power to run the bitcoin network.

well, yes, but then a single miner could and would control the entire network since 'why would any give up their compute power for free to ensure the network is not being hit by double-spend attacks, when someone else is already doing it'. The whole point of a PoW coin having huge fees and thus returns for the miners is to incentivize a decentralized ledger. I don't think Satoshi intended for it to eventually consolidate into just a few huge mining companies which theoretically could perform a double-spend attack, but it's not something that could have been protected against with a few more if statements (although, if this happened, the coin would tank in value, which is probably the inherit safeguard).

Agreed. It's a really nice idea and I'd love to see at least the top 10 coins by market cap and the top 10 most and least efficient on the list. Crypto is here to stay, so if this site can promote coins that are the most energy efficient then it can have some real environmental impact.

Truth, I was hoping to see how the greener DAG networks like IOTA and Cardano stack up here.

Exactly, hn is stuck on fossil fuel cryptocurrencies and doesn’t seem to understand that all new tech in the last 5 years hasn’t used proof of work.

Over 50% of the crypto market is PoW. It's not just HN that isn't adopting the new tech.

This is true, but things are changing. If you look at the top coins:

- #2 ethereum is moving to PoS

- #3 binance is PoS (tendermint)

- #4 cardano is PoS (ouroboros)

- #6 tether is a token

- #7 XRP is BFT-based (I think PoA?)

- etc.

Basically there's only Bitcoin, Dogecoin (lol), and Bitcoin Cash in the top 10 that are still proof of work. If you look at the top 50 it's even more biased towards non-proof of work.

> ethereum is moving to PoS

"Any day now" for the last several years.

That's because it's difficult to compete with Bitcoin on proof-of-work. Instead, they have to cut corners and create unsecure PoS money from thin air.

There are new PoW cryptocurrencies such as Grin (https://grin.mw)

How is that insecure?

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