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from the a-step-in-the-right-direction dept.
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Ethereum Plans to Cut Its Absurd Energy Consumption by 99 Percent
Bitcoin soaks up most of the hype and the opprobrium heaped on cryptocurrencies, leaving its younger and smaller sibling Ethereum in the shadows. But Ethereum is anything but small. Its market capitalization was roughly US $10 billion at press time, and it has an equally whopping energy footprint.
Ethereum mining consumes a quarter to half of what Bitcoin mining does, but that still means that for most of 2018 it was using roughly as much electricity as Iceland. Indeed, the typical Ethereum transaction gobbles more power than an average U.S. household uses in a day.
"That's just a huge waste of resources, even if you don't believe that pollution and carbon dioxide are an issue. There are real consumers—real people—whose need for electricity is being displaced by this stuff," says Vitalik Buterin, the 24-year-old Russian-Canadian computer scientist who invented Ethereum when he was just 18.
Buterin plans to finally start undoing his brainchild's energy waste in 2019. This year Buterin, the Ethereum Foundation he cofounded, and the broader open-source movement advancing the cryptocurrency all plan to field-test a long-promised overhaul of Ethereum's code. If these developers are right, by the end of 2019 Ethereum's new code could complete transactions using just 1 percent of the energy consumed today.
[...] Ethereum's plan is to replace PoW with proof of stake (PoS)—an alternative mechanism for distributed consensus that was first applied to a cryptocurrency with the launch of Peercoin in 2012. Instead of millions of processors simultaneously processing the same transactions, PoS randomly picks one to do the job.
In PoS, the participants are called validators instead of miners, and the key is keeping them honest. PoS does this by requiring each validator to put up a stake—a pile of ether in Ethereum's case—as collateral. A bigger stake earns a validator proportionately more chances at a turn, but it also means that a validator caught cheating has lots to lose.
Moving to PoS will cut the energy consumed per Ethereum transaction more than a hundredfold, according to Buterin: "The PoW part is the one that's consuming these huge amounts of electricity. The blockchain transactions themselves are not super computationally intensive. It's just verifying digital signatures. It's not some kind of heavy 3D-matrix map or machine learning on gigabytes of data," he says.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday January 03 2019, @12:40PM
It's because cryptocurrency enables the disenfranchised to participate in the modern economy.
First let me point out that "CAN I HAZ BLOCKCHAYNZ?" as practiced by the traditional financial community is smoke-and-mirrors if not outright fraud:
Cryptocurrency as insightfully explained a while back on Medium "is an asset class that enables censorship-resistant applications". If there is a "Trusted Node" that must approve or reject transactions then such censorship-resistance is not enabled.
I should also point out that for one to have a duty does not even remotely imply that whatever one is trying to facilitate is worth anyone's money, time or even mindshare. How much did the Civil War cost? Surely if it were worthwhile to have freed the slaves, they could have just purchased them at the usual slave markets, followed by emancipating them.
No, that did not happen and what's more according to this page [wikipedia.org], the US Civil War took about 665,000 lives, of which about 450,000 were _not_ caused by combat - likely disease, malnutrition, exposure and the like.
But SURELY someone could have just _purchased_ the north's victory and spared all those wasted lives?
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]