In the next few months, Ethereum will complete the transition to the consensus mechanism of proof of rights (PoS), which has brought numerous theoretical improvements. But since the beacon chain has been running for several months, we can actually study the specific figures in depth. One area we are willing to explore involves the estimation of new energy use, because we will end the process of spending a country's energy value on consensus.
So far, there is no specific energy consumption statistics (even what hardware is used), so the following is a rough estimate of the future energy consumption of Ethereum.
Since many people are running multiple validators, I decided to use the number of independent addresses that can be stored as the number of proxies for how many servers there are at present. Many pledgees can use multiple ETH 1.0 addresses, but this largely offsets those redundant settings.
At the time of writing, there are 140592 validators from 16405 independent addresses. Obviously, this is due to the deviation caused by the exchange and the staking pledge service, so deleting them will result in 87,897 verifiers being assumed to be pledged at home. As a reasonable check, this means that each home mortgagor runs an average of 5.4 validators, which is a reasonable estimate in my opinion.
Energy demand
How much energy does it take to run a beacon node (BN), a 5.4 verifier client (VC) and an Ethereum 1.0 full node? Based on my personal settings, it is about 15 watt. Joe Clapis (Rocket Pool Developer) recently ran the 10Ah USB battery pack with 65,438+00 Verifier Clients (VC), 65,438+0 Nimbus Beacon Nodes (BN) and 65,438+0 Geth complete nodes, and then ran it for 65,438+00 hours. Ordinary investors are unlikely to run such optimization settings, so we take100W as the reference number.
Multiplied by the previous 87,000 validators, the electricity consumption pledged by residents is about 1.64 MW. The energy consumption of hosting pledge is estimated to be more, and they run thousands of verifier clients with redundancy and backup.
To simplify the calculation, we also assume that 100 watt is used for every 5.5 validators. Based on the infrastructure team I have contacted, this is a rough high valuation. The real answer is about 50 times less (if you are a pledge trust team and each validator consumes more than 5 watts, I believe I can help you).
Therefore, in general, an Ethernet network using a certificate of interest (PoS) will consume about 2.62 MW of power. This is not the electricity consumption scale of a country, nor the electricity consumption scale of a province or even a city, but the electricity consumption scale of a small town (about 2 100 American families).
For reference, the current workload proves that the energy consumed by PoW Ethernet network is equivalent to that of a medium-sized country, but it is actually to ensure the safety of PoW chain. As the name implies, the consensus of PoW is based on which fork has done the most "work" in this respect. There are two ways to improve the completion rate of "work". One is to improve the efficiency of mining hardware, and the other is to use more hardware at the same time. In order to prevent the blockchain from being successfully attacked, miners must "work" faster than attackers. Because attackers are likely to have similar hardware, miners must keep a lot of efficient hardware running to prevent attackers from digging them out, all of which will consume a lot of energy.
Under the PoW consensus mechanism, ETH price is positively related to computing power. Therefore, as the price rises, the power consumption of the network will also increase in a balanced state. Under the PoS consensus mechanism, when the price of ETH rises, the security of the network will also improve (the value of ETH is higher), but the demand for energy remains unchanged.
Some comparisons
According to the estimation of digital economists, the miners in Ethereum currently consume 44.49 TWh of electricity every year, which means that the energy efficiency of PoS is improved by about 2000 times according to the above conservative estimation, which reflects that the total energy consumption is reduced by at least 99.95%.
If the energy consumption of each transaction is higher than your speed, it is about 35Wh/tx (about 60K gas/tx on average) or the power consumption of TV for about 20 minutes. In contrast, the energy consumed by each transaction of Ethereum PoW is equivalent to 2.8 days of a house, while the energy consumed by each transaction of Bitcoin is equivalent to 38 days of a house.
look into the future
Although Ethereum is still using the PoW consensus mechanism, this situation will not last long. In the past few weeks, we have seen the emergence of the first batch of test networks for merger (note: merger is the name of Ethereum when it switched from PoW to PoS). Several teams of engineers are working overtime to ensure the merger as soon as possible without affecting safety.
Capacity expansion solutions (such as aggregation and fragmentation) will help to take advantage of economies of scale and further reduce energy consumption per transaction.
The days when Ethernet consumes a lot of power are numbered, and I hope the rest of the industry will do the same.