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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: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 03 2019, @06:24PM (1 child)
How is it not, if it is all-or-nothing? If you have a lot more capital than me, and the winner goes to whomever can put up more money up front, than how can I win any transaction against you? It is like playing the card game War and my deck consists only of the lowest 13 cards in each suit, no matter what card I turn up, your card will be higher. All you have to do is play fair because the more transactions you win, the more winnings you get which means the bigger you can make your stake and thus increase your odds the next time. With this system, it seems it will encourage the "have-nots" to cheat rather than discourage it. With the current system, sure you have more miners working the job, but at least we're both picking at the same vein. In this new system, I get kicked out of the mine shaft because you have more miners than I do.
The only way to make this "fair" is to randomly pick a person to assign the task to, not a mining rig, but then you lose the anonymity of the thing. The fundamental flaw in cryptocurrencies is that anonymity comes at the ironic price of having it controlled by a few rich actors, which is exactly the opposite of how they're peddled.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday January 05 2019, @01:22AM
It doesn't. You clearly don't understand probability. This is Common Core maths you should have covered in your tweens, and explainable to a smart 8 year old, you have no excuse for ignorance. Google "probability", and search for "expectation" in whatever tutorial you find.
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