Energy consumption, a terrifying issue when you think about it carefully — DPOS beats POW

Please note that there will be a lot of data in this post. You don't need to understand these data... they are provided for those who are interested to browse and query. My conclusions will be separated from the numbers. Forgive my poor math and some rough numbers. The numbers I present are just to point out the energy consumption trend of mining cryptocurrency.

Please also note that this article is not written to scare people, but I hope that this kind of information can serve as a warning to everyone.

At the time of writing, the overall Bitcoin network hashrate is 24,267.50 petahash (coinwarz.com). If we assume that all hashrate is provided by antminer S9 (the vast majority of mining machines currently on the market are antminer S9), and assume that the average hashrate of all S9 mining machines is 13.5 TH, and the energy consumption of providing 13.5 TH of hashrate is 1.320 kilowatts (KW), we can deduce the current power consumption of the entire Bitcoin network.

24,267.5 PH = 24,267,500 TH

24,267,500/13.5 = 1,797,592.59 S9s!!!

1,797,592.59 x 1.320 (Each S9 consumes 1.320 KW) = 2,372,822.2 KW!!!

2,372,822.2 KW = 2.3728 Gigawatts (G W).

The Bitcoin network currently uses 2.3728GW of electricity!!

Maybe you don’t have a specific concept of 1GW. I found a good website: https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/how-much-power-1-gigawatt, which can help us easily understand what 1GW means.

Here are some visual examples:

1. Currently, 10,915,248 solar panels are needed to power the Bitcoin network. If we place a panel every 10 square meters, we will need 109 square kilometers of land to power the Bitcoin network, which is more than 1/4 of the area of ​​Barbados (an island in the Caribbean). (PS: It is as big as Yantai City in China.)

2. 1,186,400 wind turbines are another way to handle the current power needs of the Bitcoin network.

3. 237 million LED light bulbs.

If these S9 mining machines were running 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, the Bitcoin network would consume 20.7 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, which is equivalent to the amount of electricity consumed by the entire country of Ecuador in 2014.

This is just the Bitcoin network. In addition to Bitcoin, there are the following digital currencies that are mined through the POW model:

● Bitcoin Cash is currently using over 200,000 * S9 (Ant S9 miners) of hashing power. ---> 0.264 GW

● Lite Coin is using over 400,000 * L3 hashrates (800 watts per machine). ---> 0.32 GW

● Dash uses more than 100,000 * D3 hashrate (900+ watts per machine) ---> 0.09 GW

● Ethereum is using (in simple terms) the hashrate of 10.8 million RX580s (153 watts per GPU) ---> 1.65 GW

There are many other currencies similar to the POW model, such as Zcash, Sia, Monero, etc. What is certain is that if all the remaining POW model coins are counted, the electricity consumed by "mining" will increase by an additional 1-2GW .

If the same amount of energy consumption is converted into burning coal resources, I got the following information from the following webpage (https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@allcapsonezero/the-next-attack-on-bitcoin-energy-consumption-of-bitcoin-and-proof-of-work-coins )

Discover an even more terrifying fact: it takes 440 tons of coal to generate 600 megawatts (MW) of electricity, and we are using 8 times this value to support the 6 largest cryptocurrency networks - this will consume a full 4,800 tons of coal!

High energy consumption will cause environmentalists to start targeting those POW-based cryptocurrency assets. Many energy sources are non-renewable, and POW's energy consumption is terrible.

Bitmain, AMD, Nvidia and others are not slowing down the pace of updating the technology needed to mine digital assets, which means that the computing power required for the PoW model will continue to grow, and the energy consumption will continue to increase.

As for the traditional financial industry (Google told me that there are at least 13,000-30,000 banks in the world), the computing power required and the electricity consumed by their bloated Internet financial systems are far higher than that of cryptocurrencies . I believe that in the near future, cryptocurrency systems will replace them.

I found that some cryptocurrencies in the world have begun to shift to the POS model (such as ETH, Peercoin), and there are also networks that directly use the POS model (NEO, Reddcoin, Lisk, etc.), but they only reduce energy consumption to a certain extent in a sense.

An example of STEEM and EOS

Steem is a blockchain network that uses the DPOS (delegated proof of ownership) mechanism . Blocks are no longer produced by "computing power mining", but by witnesses generated by voting. I don't know how many witnesses there are in total, but most of them are produced by more than 100 witness node servers in the entire network. The average server energy consumption may reach 850 watts , and only 85 KW of electricity is needed to run the Steem blockchain. The DPOS model also protects the security of the Steem network. It is almost impossible to hack node servers scattered around the world at the same time. Compared with the 2.3GW energy consumption used to protect the Bitcoin network, the energy consumption of the entire Steem network is negligible.

I found a very interesting phenomenon from https://www.blocktivity.info/ (a website that counts the transaction volume of each blockchain): the Steem network carries the most transactions and is far from reaching the zero point (still green), while Ethereum and BTC are yellow (although the Lightning Network has helped BTC share a large number of small transactions). At the time of writing this article, Steem's transaction volume is 10 times that of Bitcoin , and it does this at an energy consumption of 85 KW, not 2.3 GW!

EOS will be designed in a very similar way to the Steem blockchain (DPOS mode), and may be another more efficient DPOS mode . I believe that when EOS goes online, it will perform better than Steem.

The future of cryptocurrency remains a mystery. As more players and funds enter the market, and their attention is focused on predicting how much Bitcoin will increase in the next three years, I think it is time to pay more attention to and solve Bitcoin's high energy consumption and low performance problems.

I hope you were able to gain something from today's research and understand my views on the future of cryptocurrency (I think it will grow to an amazing extent). I also know that it will have to go through various attacks and make various changes to get to the end. Energy consumption is an issue that digital currencies will have to face for some time to come, and we will witness the birth of those digital currencies that will eventually stand firm.