Miners around the world produce trillions of computations every minute and whoever gets to the winning proof-of-work first receives a batch of that cryptocurrency, which typically happens every 10 minutes. Miners use a process called ‘hashing’ – turning an input into a sequence of letters and numbers – to solve these complex puzzles. Coming up with this proof-of-work, which has to meet the rules outlined by the network, is extremely difficult and miners will only earn Ethereum once they guess the computation that matches the conditions of the protocol. To successfully create a block, miners have to figure out a new winning proof-of-work. PoW is a consensus mechanism that essentially operates by miners competing to propose valid blocks that can be added to the blockchain. The main criticism of both Bitcoin and Ethereum is the excessive amount of energy used in the proof-of-work (PoW) mining process.
This massive reduction in energy use will take Ethereum from requiring a country’s worth of power to the equivalent of a small town with about 2100 homes.Įthereum’s new staking model is expected to be roughly 7,000 times more energy-efficient than Bitcoin. With these estimates combined, Beekhuizen says that Ethereum’s energy consumption will be 2.62 megawatts post-merge. Then there’s custodial stakers who, based on what Beekhuizen considers to be an overestimation, use roughly 100W per 5.5 validators, totalling to 0.98 megawatts of energy. It’s estimated that there are approximately 87,000 validators staking at home using roughly 100W of power, meaning that at home-stakers use about 1.64 megawatts in total. In the blog post, Beekhuizen outlined how ‘The Merge’ will significantly reduce the network’s energy usage. The objective is that Ethereum’s mainnet will eventually merge with Beacon Chain, enabling network-wide staking and marking the end of the current mining system. Ethereum to become more environmentally friendlyĪ major part of the Ethereum 2.0 upgrades is the addition of the new Beacon Chain which introduced staking to the network, in an effort to reduce energy inefficiency. Unsurprisingly, the news sent waves through the market, prompting many to reconsider the environmental impact of Bitcoin.Įthereum has taken centre stage after revealing estimates that its upcoming migration to proof-of-stake will reduce the blockchain’s power consumption by 99.95%, according to a blog posted by Carl Beekhuizen of the Ethereum Foundation. The cryptocurrency market nosedived on Wednesday 12th May after Elon Musk announced that Tesla will no longer accept Bitcoin as a payment method, citing concerns over increasing fossil fuel usage in the digital currency’s mining and transaction processes.
As criticisms of energy inefficiency continue to plague the cryptocurrency market, the Ethereum Foundation has announced that the world’s second-largest crypto will be moving from mining to staking in the coming months, a transition that will reduce Ethereum’s energy consumption by more than 99%.
0 kommentar(er)
