Topic: Can we reduce the energy consumption of POW? And whether it is necessary (Read 204 times)

Not really. What happens, is that the hashrate-per-watt goes up. As long as it's profitable, money is converted into hardware and heat. The best solution for lower energy consumption is lower block rewards, but that only works if transaction fees don't go up too much.

Apparently any consensus can be pooled in this or that way. Nowadays two Bitcoin pools have 51% of hashrate.

Sure, but it's a tough sell to justify it for something people see less important then transportation and foode. Nocoiners don't generally see bitcoin as a net positive or even as a solution to anything. And it's hard to argue back when most of the crypto people seem to want centralization and synthetic bitcoins if it brings us more money. And when that centralization part is being attacked by officials, it immediately affects to bitcoin's price. Even though bitcoin should have nothing to do with it.

And when it comes to question of OP, so far i haven't heard any proof of work that would mean less work/power consumption. The answer is literally in the acronym.

PoS is the solution for it. But are you going to settle for PoS when PoW is the most secured of them all? if you are for security, PoW is the key. But if not, then PoS is totally fine and if you're already rich then it's likely that you'd be richer with that.

Exactly.
But because of what they believe is right, they've pushed for it and it happened for ETH. And we're seeing more of these projects go into PoS because of their advocacy to save energy. Like everytime there's a PoW discussion, it's always the emission that they discuss like it's a curse that they can't getaway with it.

The problem with POS is with centralization. All the token is concentrated in a single pool so if something happens with it the whole Blockchain can be in danger. Though it consum less energy and faster than most POW network but it's centralization problem can be a big concern in the future. Vitalik also said that the problem of eth centralization will not solve very soon.

PoW security lies in the resource utilisation. Hashrate is an effect, not a cause.


PoS is the most efficient.


Somehow you assume that the opportunity cost of matter is less than of energy, while an arbitrage is possible due to E=mc².


Rather still than already: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/can-pow-and-pos-be-mixed-and-run-alternately-5466321

Of course we can reduce the energy consumption of Proof-Of-Work. The most unfortunate problem that POW mining has, is that the mining equipment is based on electrical components that have relatively high electrical resistance.

The good news is that we discover new technologies and new science everyday. Superconductor technologies are being heavily researched right now and that means we might see efficient, very low energy miners soon. Unfortunately that scientific progress takes time, as it is a gradual but rather slow process.

If you were to look at old computers for example, you would see that not even a few years ago, the electricity they required was absurdly high, compared to modern computers.

Modern desktop computers use less than half the wattage of a computer from the year 2000. And I cannot even imagine the costs of mining on an old computer with outdated technology.

Honestly, there are so many things that consume energy so much that I am sick and tired of hearing how much mining uses energy. I get that it might be using some, but it is something that can be turned into solar in a single day, you can literally put solar panels into every mining company and just fix it all together, all self sufficient. Go check out aviation, how are you going to fix that? Tell me about that, are you going to make electric planes? Cause that's possible and yet nobody is ever even attempting it. Hell the whole electric vehicle god Elon still uses fire, like a caveman.

I think it is quite obvious that there are much larger issues with energy consumption, specifically about oil and gas, those need to get down a lot, and if not then looking at bitcoin for a solution is not it, we are not going to have that at all, we are not going to just get rid of bitcoin miners and suddenly the world has enough energy, it is just not true at all.

I believe that continuous research and development are being done to produce efficient hardware. Having this kind of technology, it would decrease the power consumption hence lessening the cost of operation for maintaining the hash rate. This is one way that I could think of to reduce the energy consumption of devices. Adding renewable energy resources could help as well.

Are there hybrid talks with PoW with PoS already? I'm not sure if I have read some resources about this. I'm thinking about it with like the approach to gasoline cars or something. A hybrid.

The problem is not the energy consumption itself, but rather the higher cost of maintaining the hash rate that comes with energy consumption. Based on the principles of mining competition and economics, the cost of acquiring mining machines cannot be reduced. In fact, it will be affected by the mining returns.

The question is how much it costs to maintain the hash rate, which ultimately counts towards the cost of maintaining the blockchain network. For an efficient blockchain network, this cost should be reduced as much as possible.

If we can reduce energy consumption, we can reduce the cost of maintaining the hash rate, which reduces the cost of running the blockchain. Although purchasing storage equipment may be as expensive as purchasing ASIC miner, the cost of keeping the storage equipment running is much lower than the cost of keeping the ASIC miner powered on. Due to the decrease in energy costs, mining machines will not have to shut down due to a drop in coin prices. And this could prevent the hash rate from declining.

That's why I started Black PoS, but got a bigger picture since then.


PoW and PoC (capacity) give more time for decentralization, however the end game is quite similar: eventually, all matter-energy is owned, so one can't join a consensus without a permission like in PoS.


Why do you think the matter consumption is a lesser problem than the energy consumption, afraid of Universe's thermal death?

Yes everyday new technology released and it's quite possible to made hardware node to reduce the energy consumption of Proof-of-Work mechanisms.

I think it will help in  enhancing network sustainability. Other benefit will be to encourage the wider adoption when costs reduce and also help in promote  to a world wide.


Methods to reduce POW energy consumption maybe optimizing mining hardware, and use different algorithm enhancements for more efficiency.

Bitcoin price is already surging and with the brc20 soams the miners are making better reap than expected.

If running miners will be no more profitable then no one is going to make a loss and mine bitcoin but its unlikely to happen based on the history of bitcoin.

You want to adjust the fundamental laws of physics to suit you. The very definition of electric current, without which mining is impossible, implies the release of thermal energy. From own example, we know that we have gone from miniature USB block eruptors and VGA to “monstrous” ASICs. First there was scaling (increasing the number of transaction processing devices), and then combining the set into one device and reducing its size. Of course, we are faced with an increase in electrical energy and an increase in heat generation.
If we change the BTC algorithm, we can process transactions even on calculators and smart watches, but then we will face a threat to the existence of the blockchain itself. What is important is the speed of transaction processing (and of course decentralization), and not just the fact that such processing is possible.

Thank you very much for your discussion. In fact, just like you, I don’t think the energy consumption and carbon emissions of mining itself will be a problem.

But we cannot ignore the cost of energy consumption, and this cost needs to be paid by every Bitcoin holder.

Of course, we can think of mining as an investment behavior that requires income and returns. Considering the risks brought by price fluctuations and the increase in the hash rate of the entire network, the annualized return of mining should be higher than other lower-risk activities. invest.

The cost of miners mainly includes equipment and electricity costs. Equipment investment, electricity costs, and miner profits are ultimately paid by Bitcoin holders and potential holders. There is no doubt that electricity bills will eventually become the most significant cost of running the entire network. If we can reduce this cost, fewer miners will shut down after the block reward is halved, and the entire network will be more secure.

Could using non-computing devices solve this problem? Such as storage devices?

Of course, I know that there have been hard disk mining before, but in my opinion they were not successful. There seemed to be some loopholes in the design of the mining algorithm, which caused the storage capacity of the entire network to reach an unrealistic value.

maybe we can solve this problem

Thank you very much for the discussion, and first of all I want to say that I agree with most of your points. I also think POS is far less secure than POW, and POS greatly weakens decentralization, which is the core feature of the blockchain. And I don’t think energy consumption and carbon emissions will be a big problem. But what I care about is actually the network maintenance costs caused by energy consumption. In other words, the purpose of reducing energy consumption is not to protect the environment, but to reduce network maintenance costs.

Because in the long run, energy costs will account for the majority of mining costs, and only when the benefits are greater than the costs will the miners work and the network will be safe. As the block reward is halved, if the price remains unchanged, the miners' income will also be halved. At this time, some mining machines may have to shut down. Bitcoin is unlikely to experience a price surge after every halving. Once the block reward reaches a certain level, it may pose a threat to the security of the entire network. To avoid this, we might have to set a minimum block reward for miners, like Monero does, but I don't think that solves the problem.

What I want to ask is, is there a way for us to continue to use POW and reduce energy consumption without reducing the hash rate ?

Well, it's subjective depends on the individuals and some may claim why we need to spend so much energy when we can simply make it happen with few servers and bank databases but the huge difference is decentralization which they don't understand or they pretend it to be not understanding.

Maybe they should give up their Air conditioned rooms that is consuming more power and to be honest it's such a waste of energy compared to the usability.

Bitcoin mining energy consumption is for a good cause, it enables the processing of Bitcoin transactions, so in the end the energy used for it is worthwhile cause. Besides it can not be compered to the energy consumed by industries that produces valuable goods. Perhaps countries can increase electric power distribution to carter for it's increasing demand, in this age, practically to get things done requires electricity, so the power consumption need is not perculiar to Bitcoin mining.

Crypto mining is the least energy consumption people need to worry about, there are a lot of other stuff that consume massive energy. Food processing, transportation, .etc. According to this article, https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-energy-use-compare-industry Bitcoin only consumes 0.28% of energy of total energy consumption by Transportation.

https://www.techopedia.com/bitcoin-mining-and-energy-statistics#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20New%20York,cooling%20throughout%20the%20US%20annually.

In here, Bitcoin mining consumes roughly 0.5% of all energy produced worldwide.

That number is insignificant, even if all the miners stop, energy crisis will still happening. 

To be provably secure, it has to utilise 51% of matter-energy kinda like a black hole. If the energy consumption is figured out then it needs something else i.e. matter. I can't see a way out of this circle. Then there's the famous formula E=mc².

Bitcoin is the only project that is running PoW on a higher scale but even with that higher scale it doesn't come anywhere near in the top list that contributes to environmental damage aka climate change and whatever they claim it to be.

Reducing the hah power will give more chance for someone to get 51% of the total network then they can able to manipulate the blocks so the higher the hash rates the better the decentralization will be.

POS or proof of stake is already an alternative mechanism of POW in which it uses less energy and is less complex than its equivalent the problem with POS is it might not be as secure as POW

1. Can we reduce the energy consumption of POW?
2. Is it valuable to reduce the energy consumption of POW? What benefits will it bring besides carbon emissions and environmental protection?
3. Will reducing the energy consumption of POW reduce security and decentralization?
4. What methods do you think can be used to reduce the energy consumption of POW?