Ethereum Plans to Cut Its Absurd Energy Consumption by 99 Percent

If these developers are right, by the end of 2019 Ethereum’s new code could complete transactions using just 1 percent of the energy consumed today.Ethereum’s attempted rebirth will be one of the year’s “most fascinating technologies to watch,” says Zaki Manian, who is advising the cryptocurrency upstart Cosmos. “It is by far the most technically ambitious open community project that has ever been attempted,” says Manian.Like Bitcoin, Ethereum relies on a blockchain, which is a digital ledger of transactions maintained by a community of users. In practice, however, the development of application-specific ICs (ASICs) that accelerate mining, produced by a handful of chip fabs in China, has concentrated power over many cryptocurrencies.Ethereum took the fight against concentrated power one step further by selecting a memory-intensive PoW algorithm for mining “ether,” as its value token is known. For me it is the No. 1 priority,” says Ethereum contributor Paul Hauner, a cofounder of Australian cybersecurity and blockchain-development firm Sigma Prime.Ethereum’s plan is to replace PoW with proof of stake (PoS)—an alternative mechanism for distributed consensus that was first applied to a cryptocurrency with the launch of Peercoin in 2012. A bigger stake earns a validator proportionately more chances at a turn, but it also means that a validator caught cheating has lots to lose.Moving to PoS will cut the energy consumed per Ethereum transaction more than a hundredfold, according to Buterin: “The PoW part is the one that’s consuming these huge amounts of electricity. Vlad Zamfir, Ethereum Foundation’s lead PoS developer, likens this to the Bitcoin community gaining the power to incinerate the data centers of a miner who abuses his power.By 2015, the advantages of PoS had already convinced the Ethereum community to make the shift, and leaders such as Buterin had expected to do so in just a year or two.