Add page about energy use post-merge [Issue #3020] #4654
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skylarweaver
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Awesome - thanks for opening this @skylarweaver! We already have a WIP PR that addresses this same issue - see #3650 Given that page is close to getting merged, I'd suggest we stick with that. Is there anything you'd like to add to that page from this PR you created? |
nassersaazi
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just thought the wording might need to be a bit more formal -- i may be wrong:(
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| **TL;DR: Ethereum will use at least ~99.95% less energy post merge.** | ||
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| Ethereum will be completing the transition to Proof-of-Stake in the upcoming months, which brings a myriad of improvements that have been theorized for years. But now that the Beacon chain has been running for a few months, we can actually dig into the numbers. One area that we’re excited to explore involves new energy-use estimates, as we end the process of expending a country’s worth of energy on consensus. |
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| Ethereum will be completing the transition to Proof-of-Stake in the upcoming months, which brings a myriad of improvements that have been theorized for years. But now that the Beacon chain has been running for a few months, we can actually dig into the numbers. One area that we’re excited to explore involves new energy-use estimates, as we end the process of expending a country’s worth of energy on consensus. | |
| Ethereum will be completing the transition to Proof-of-Stake in the upcoming months, which brings a myriad of improvements that have been theorized for years. But now that the Beacon chain has been running for a few months, we can actually dig into the numbers. One area that we are excited to explore involves new energy use estimates, as we end the process of expending a country’s worth of energy on consensus. |
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| How much power does it take to run a beacon node (BN), 5.4 validator clients (VC), and an eth1 full-node? Using an average personal setup as a base, it’s around 15 watt. Joe Clapis (a Rocket Pool dev) recently ran 10 VCs, a Nimbus BN, and a Geth full node off of a 10Ah USB battery bank for 10 hours, meaning that this setup averaged 5W. It is unlikely that the average staker is running such an optimised setup, so let’s call it 100W all in. |
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| How much power does it take to run a beacon node (BN), 5.4 validator clients (VC), and an eth1 full-node? Using an average personal setup as a base, it’s around 15 watt. Joe Clapis (a Rocket Pool dev) recently ran 10 VCs, a Nimbus BN, and a Geth full node off of a 10Ah USB battery bank for 10 hours, meaning that this setup averaged 5W. It is unlikely that the average staker is running such an optimised setup, so let’s call it 100W all in. | |
| How much power does it take to run a beacon node (BN), 5.4 validator clients (VC), and an eth1 full-node? Using an average personal setup as a base, it is around 15 watt. Joe Clapis (a Rocket Pool developer) recently ran 10 VCs, a Nimbus BN, and a Geth full node off of a 10Ah USB battery bank for 10 hours, meaning that this setup averaged 5W. It is unlikely that the average staker is running such an optimised setup, so let us call it 100W all in. |
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| Multiplying this with the 87k validators from before means that home-stakers consume ~1.64 megawatt. Estimating the power consumed by custodial stakers is a bit harder, they run tens of thousands of validator clients with redundancy and backups. | ||
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| To make life easy, let’s also just assume that they use 100W per 5.5 validators. Based off of the staking infrustructure teams I have spoken to, this is a **gross** over-estimate. The real answer is something like 50x less. |
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| To make life easy, let’s also just assume that they use 100W per 5.5 validators. Based off of the staking infrustructure teams I have spoken to, this is a **gross** over-estimate. The real answer is something like 50x less. | |
| To make life easy, let us also just assume that they use 100W per 5.5 validators. Based off of the staking infrastructure teams I have spoken to, this is a **gross** over-estimate. The real answer is something like 50x less. |
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| For reference, Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus on Ethereum currently consumes the energy equivalent of a medium-sized country, but this is actually necessary to keep a PoW chain safe. As the name suggests, PoW reaches consensus based off of which fork has the most “work” done on it. There are two ways to increase the rate of “work” being done, increase the efficiency of mining hardware and using more hardware at the same time. To prevent a chain from being successfully attacked, miners must be doing “work” at a rate greater than an attacker could. As an attacker is likely to have similar hardware, miners must keep large amounts of efficient hardware running to prevent an attacker from out-mining them and all this hardware uses a lot of power. | ||
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| Under PoW, as the price of ETH and the hashrate are positively correlated. Therefore, as as the price increases, in equilibrium so too does the power consumed by the network. Under Proof-of-Stake, when the price of ETH increases, the security of the network does too (the value of the ETH at-stake is worth more), but the energy requirements remain unchanged. |
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| Under PoW, as the price of ETH and the hashrate are positively correlated. Therefore, as as the price increases, in equilibrium so too does the power consumed by the network. Under Proof-of-Stake, when the price of ETH increases, the security of the network does too (the value of the ETH at-stake is worth more), but the energy requirements remain unchanged. | |
| Under PoW, the price of ETH and the hashrate are positively correlated. Therefore, as the price increases, in equilibrium so too does the power consumed by the network. Under Proof-of-Stake, when the price of ETH increases, the security of the network does too (the value of the ETH at stake is worth more), but the energy requirements remain unchanged. |
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| [Digiconomist estimates](https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption/) that Ethereum miners currently consume 44.49 TWh per year which works out to 5.13 gigawatt on a continuing basis. This means that PoS is ~2000x more energy efficient based on the conservative estimates above, which reflects a reduction of at least 99.95% in total energy use. | ||
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| If energy consumption per-transaction is more your speed, that’s ~35Wh/tx (avg ~60K gas/tx) or about 20 minutes of TV. By contrast, Ethereum PoW uses the equivalent energy of a house for 2.8 days per transaction and Bitcoin consumes 38 house-days worth. |
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| If energy consumption per-transaction is more your speed, that’s ~35Wh/tx (avg ~60K gas/tx) or about 20 minutes of TV. By contrast, Ethereum PoW uses the equivalent energy of a house for 2.8 days per transaction and Bitcoin consumes 38 house-days worth. | |
| If energy consumption per transaction is more your speed, that is ~35Wh/tx (avg ~60K gas/tx) or about 20 minutes of TV. By contrast, Ethereum PoW uses the equivalent energy of a house for 2.8 days per transaction and Bitcoin consumes 38 house-days worth. |
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| ## Looking Forward {looking-forward} | ||
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| While Ethereum continues to use PoW for now, that won’t be the case for much longer. In the past few months, [we have seen](https://twitter.com/protolambda/status/1388093066993668098) the emergence of the first testnets for _The Merge_, the name given to the moment Ethereum switches to from PoW to PoS. Several teams of engineers are working overtime to ensure that _The Merge_ arrives as soon as possible, and without compromising on safety. |
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| While Ethereum continues to use PoW for now, that won’t be the case for much longer. In the past few months, [we have seen](https://twitter.com/protolambda/status/1388093066993668098) the emergence of the first testnets for _The Merge_, the name given to the moment Ethereum switches to from PoW to PoS. Several teams of engineers are working overtime to ensure that _The Merge_ arrives as soon as possible, and without compromising on safety. | |
| While Ethereum continues to use PoW for now, that will not be the case for much longer. In the past few months, [we have seen](https://twitter.com/protolambda/status/1388093066993668098) the emergence of the first testnets for _The Merge_, the name given to the moment Ethereum switches to from PoW to PoS. Several teams of engineers are working overtime to ensure that _The Merge_ arrives as soon as possible, and without compromising on safety. |
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| Scaling solutions (such as rollups and sharding) will help further decrease the energy consumed per-transaction by leveraging economies of scale. | ||
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| Ethereum’s power-hungry days are numbered, and hopefully that’s true for the rest of the industry too. |
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| Ethereum’s power-hungry days are numbered, and hopefully that’s true for the rest of the industry too. | |
| Ethereum’s power-hungry days are numbered, and hopefully that is true for the rest of the industry too. |
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Closing as discussed in #3650 |
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This is my suggestion for addressing #3020
Essentially I just used Carl's article and adapted it very slightly (removed first-person language and some other slight modifications to make it a bit more formal).
I think there is no better way to address the environmental impact FUD than 1) primarily focusing on how much the switch to PoS will reduce Ethereum's energy impact, and 2) then secondarily focusing on the current impact of PoW. Carl's article does this very well IMO.
Some thoughts:
This is just a quick proposal to get something moving here. Other suggestions, edits, modifications welcome. If we want to go another route than using Carl's blog post, I understand that too.