Ethereum will save 99.95% of mining energy

Bitcoin supporter, Elon Musk earlier tweeted that Bitcoin mining energy consumption was too high, and Tesla also suspended accepting Bitcoin payments at that time.

After the bad news appeared, Bitcoin subsequently plunged. The founder of the leading exchange Binance stated that the energy consumption of Bitcoin mining is much less than that of gold mining.

However, it is also true that Bitcoin mining requires a lot of energy, although some top mining farms have begun to use solar and wind energy for mining.

It is well known that Ethereum mining mainly relies on the graphics card for workload calculation, which has also caused the price of graphics cards to soar, making it difficult for many gamers to buy graphics cards.

Earlier, Ethereum has planned to change the mining model, from the traditional proof-of-work (PoW) model to the proof-of-stake model, which eliminates the need for a graphics card.

It’s just that this new mining method has not yet been fully upgraded. If it goes well, the Ethereum may be upgraded at the end of the year, thus abandoning hardware mining.

The original proof of PoW workload mainly relies on graphics cards and consumes a lot of energy. Calculations show that the energy consumed by this mining method is equivalent to a medium-sized country.

Moreover, the higher the price of Ethereum, the more miners involved in mining, the more difficult it is to mine, and the more energy it consumes, so the mining process consumes a lot of energy.

The proof of stake in PoS uses Ethereum holders to deposit in Ethereum to construct blocks. This block construction method requires relatively low energy consumption.

From the figure below, it can be seen that the mining energy consumption of Ethereum as of March 2021 is close to 14GW. If the PoS equity certificate is adopted, the energy consumption during the same period is only 0.003GW.

The Ethereum proof-of-stake mining will eventually reach the state of completely abandoning graphics card mining, and the entire Ethereum network no longer needs to consume a lot of energy.

It’s just that the work progress of the Ethereum project team is often delayed. According to optimistic expectations, Ethereum will upgrade the proof of equity by the end of this year, but it may also be delayed.