As a Bitcoin miner (<a href="https://toom.im" rel="nofollow">https://toom.im</a>), while I appreciate the work put into it, this particular metric of "transactions per kW" might not work the way you expect.<p>The main point that you should understand is that a PoW blockchain's energy usage <i>is not</i> proportional to its transactions.<p>I'll say that a different way: the transactions themselves do not use any energy in mining.<p>I'll say this in a third way: it takes exactly the same amount of energy to mine an empty block as it does a 1GB block of transactions, as it does a 1,000,000,000 PB block.<p>In reality, transactions are all hashed together in a mining pool into a single numeric hash before miners ever see them. It doesn't matter how many transactions are included in the hash. The hashpower just has to find a magic number matching that hash.<p>On the other hand, the #1 factor that increases a blockchain's energy usage is its price per coin. The price of a coin is how much that coin is worth to be mined, which is the incentive for miners to dump energy into mining it. In steady state, miners will dump energy into mining a coin until the cost of energy = the value of the coins coming out.<p>This is why you can see Bitcoin SV at the top of the list -- it's worth the least of the Bitcoins.<p>And it's also misleading to compute the second factor -- transactions per second -- by counting the actual transactions on the blockchain, rather than looking at the transaction capacity. Because blockchains only cost something per transaction once they reach capacity. This is misleading with Bitcoin SV, for instance, because that coin artificially creates bogus transactions on its blockchain in order to make it look popular and demonstrate the vision of large blockchains. Bitcoin Cash, on the other hand, can handle a thousands of transactions per second (on testnet) but doesn't clog its live blockchain with them.<p>So, in sum, if you send a transaction on Bitcoin Cash, it will cost 0 kW of electricity, even though it says 31.3 Txs/MWh (which equates to 31.9kW/Tx) in this chart. This is because transactions do not cost anything in electricity. Electricity only goes to preventing double-spends. A better metric would be "energy use per double-spend that was prevented."
Isn't this basically 1 / popularity? I'm presuming other coins have the Bitcoin feature of getting harder as more powerful miners appear.
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.
Cool chart!<p>Interesting to see how much of an outlier Bitcoin is.<p>The middle tier currencies in this list (USDC, USDT, etc) are built on Ethereum, so once Ethereum finishes its switch over to proof-of-stake, both they and Ethereum will drop down to almost nothing in terms of power used per transaction.
PoW in conjunction with blockchain is anti-efficiency by design. It’s a principle of the ledger’s security and an inevitability that mature networks waste energy in exchange for that.<p>Anyone serious about this topic needs to think beyond blockchain into fundamentally different technologies, like Nano, or things which forego decentralization entirely.
This chart is nice, but you need to include the difficulty of the algorithm (difficulty to attack), the size of the blockchain (hard for anyone except rich people to participate if you need a server farm just to verify a transaction), developer activity, and each coin should have a collapsable subset of “layer-2” options (eg. Lightning and liquid for Bitcoin), and their statistics as well.<p>Most importantly, A “transaction” on a blockchain is not a “transaction” in the colloquial sense.
This actually points out why Tesla not accepting bitcoin for environmental reasons is silly: 134.0 kg of CO2 per transaction about as much CO2 as a tank of gas. This is ridiculously inefficient, but <i>it's a car;</i> the energy inputs are already high.<p>The real issue is the interest Musk created when Tesla bought bitcoin a few months ago and how he grew a conscious suspiciously fast.
Txs / MWh is not a valid metric for most cryptocurrencies since power consumption is proportional to price, not transactions.<p>Also, BSV and BCH are totally insecure so it's not really fair to compare them to secure cryptocurrencies.
Note that Bitcoin SV is completely controlled by miners, a 51% attack can change the rules. In the original Bitcoin, a 51% attack can only reverse recent transactions, not change the rules or compromise stored funds.
Kind of a self-defeating list. As a PoW cryptocurrency becomes more popular, the value of a single coin goes up, so the mining reward will go up in terms of USD. As a result, the equilibrium energy usage in mining goes up proportionally to the increase in value. So if people start using a cryptocurrency because it is more efficient, it will stop being efficient.
> It is great to see effort being put into researching cleaner alternatives. Unfortunately, there is no working PoS-based system that does not rely on some degree of centralization in its security model.<p>This is false. See Algorand, Cardano, Mina, etc.<p>Proof-of-work is very much a technology of the past. It's the fossil fuel of cryptocurrencies.
Total noob, but I'm wondering since generating the blockchain (at least with bitcoin) is about finding match (or should I say) partial match of a specific hash.<p>Could that information be somehow used to cracking encryption that relies on cryptographic hashes?
I’m not sure whether Stellar Lumens (XLM) counts as POW, POS or something else but it sure is energy efficient. It’s also the 3rd most popular cryptocurrency on Coinbase.<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellar/comments/nbqfey/since_co2_emissions_are_on_peoples_minds_right/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellar/comments/nbqfey/since_co2_e...</a>
A fascinating thought experiment would be to have a further breakdown by "non-speculative" transaction. It's difficult/impossible to compute whether a transaction's purpose is speculation, but given that that's most of what these coins are currently used for, it would surprise me if less than half of these transactions are for the purpose of price speculation. This is going to make these coins compare substantially less favorably compared to e.g. credit cards or cash money.
The "most efficient" cryptocurrencies on this list are the <i>least</i> secure, ie. the ones where double-spend attacks are the <i>least</i> expensive to conduct.
So basically they're all bad except for SV? 1 Gallon of gas makes 2.4 kg emissions, so instead of swiping a card its burning a few gallons of gas, or 50 gallons for BTC.
Are there any coins with a reasonable transaction cost? It seems shocking to me the USD-normalized cost per transaction given that the actual cost should be near zero.<p>Visa/MC has a cost of like $.25+some percent so I suppose represents the cost of having a trusted oracle with fraud, review, etc.<p>This seems like it should be the standard to beat for whether a currency can actually be used for anything normal and necessary to get wide uptake.
Largely meaningless numbers, because energy efficiency scales inversely (loosely speaking) with network size. You can do some nice tricks to improve efficiency, but the scaling will never be good, as these networks all use the same consensus algorithms. The only project I've seen with fundamentally superior scaling is Avalanche, but it's new technology and I'm not yet entirely convinced.
There will be a time, where we have legislation to ban energy-inefficient crypto-currencies from being traded on regulated exchanges. This would make any proof of work currency essentially useless in the legislated areas. My bet is, EU will start, others will follow.
This will lead to pressure to convert BTC, ETH etc. finally to proof of stake variants.
How did you include all the transactions made on the cryptocurrencies various lightning networks? I guess that could be quite hard to measure, since they aren't stored on the blockchain, although are equally valid transactions on the network.
There is a lot of ignorance going around here.
Bitcoin SV is cheaper because it can handle vastly more transactions per block, making it more efficient.
Bitcoin SV believes in unrestricted scalability. Yes mostly this means miners will tend to agglomerate, and specialize I to big data center. Well know public entities that must follow law. but we believe all miners also have an incentive to not let any other gros past 50%. Today none is more than 38%, so we're safe.
And also we have had big blocks with hundred of thousand of transaction. these block generate a lot of transaction fee, sometimes more than the mining reward ! Which we all know will decrease over time, to only rely on tx fee. Which BSV embraces. The node has been worked on to support Tera Node, with Tera Block, and billions of tx, the world of tomorrow, the enterprise grade blockchain. Yes indeed it's more environmental friendly to be more efficient.
Mildly off topic question:<p>If one had Bitcoin in an exchange instead of an offline wallet, does that mean that when forks occur, the exchange does not give you coins in the fork?<p>Also, what about PoS coins? Aren't those vastly more efficient than any of these?
Ethereum's move to proof of stake (in process now) should improve its carbon profile. Further, with the Polygon Commit Chain working with Ethereum, I believe that carbon emission will not be a major concern.
It doesn't mention any PoS solution (which are, compared to PoW) extremely energy efficient. They do mention in the FAQ that they're not included since they still depend on some sort of centralization, but as far as I know this is not true for, for example, avalanche (<a href="https://avax.network" rel="nofollow">https://avax.network</a>)<p>It's not really clear who is behind this site and if there's some hidden agenda.
Let's assume not (but with crypto you can never be sure) and that they will properly consider PoS blockchains if they are as decentralized (or more) as the listed PoW chains.
if a huge hydro power generator in a remote location on a far away continent wastes local energy, does my city power bill go up? because of BTC ? tell me more
PoW doesn't make transactions. The purpose is to secure the network. It's useful to compare this to the cost of attack: <a href="https://www.crypto51.app" rel="nofollow">https://www.crypto51.app</a> (this data is somewhat outdated)<p>Also, this doesn't take off-chain transactions into account. There's way more actual financial transactions on Bitcoin when every L2 transaction is counted. Lightning network scales to billions of transactions per second, without adding PoW energy consumption.
From the FAQ Page:<p>>What about Ripple/IOTA/...?<p>>As with Proof of Stake we are aware of no existing, alternative protocol that has solved the problem of distributed consensus. Usually these approaches have resulted in some form of centralized authority becoming an important factor in the security model.<p>>Of course a centralized systems can achieve a far greater energy efficiency. Here we want to compare only distributed systems and their properties.<p>----------<p>Everyone should know by now that Ripple is a company not a blockchain.
And the XRPL is fully decentral with no authority at all.<p>See XRPL.org
People that complain that PoW cryptos spend too much energy don't understand that it's just another form of conversion of energy, just like every other action human take.<p>Average Joe has a manual labor, his physical energy is converted into labor, which converts to fiat currency. The food that Joe ate also require some amount of energy to grow and become Joe's food.<p>PoW mining converts raw electric energy into a digitally transmissible currency
The most important thing to watch out for in this type of articles is for this push by certain anti-market interests to not succeed in a mining or even an outright Bitcoin ban in the West. They are using both environmental angle and an terrorist angle to justify a potential action, that can range from a new type of mining tax to an outright Bitcoin ban.
You've left out PeerCoin (PPC) the original PoW cryptocurrency which has been in constant operation and development since 2013. It is by far the most energy efficient, as that was one of the main goals in the design of PeerCoin.
Get the signals or stay poor. Elon Musk said that BTC should increase the block. Who is the only person who has worked to increase the bitcoin block? obviously Dr Craig Steven Wright ... Current block is 638MB