Is there any research being done to make the blockchain less energy consuming?

[Borilla]

What are the possibilities? advantages/disadvantages...
anything planned?

[aleksej996]

Some people think PoS is the answer, as it will provide confirmations with no extra energy consumptions.

I would argue that energy consumption is a feature, not a bug. That it is necessary and that if a blockchain isn't PoW, it isn't a blockchain.
Energy consumption required to solve cryptographic puzzles on Bitcoin blockchain is what ties the technology to the real world.
It is what gives people an identity, it is what stops spamming and gives people an incentive to reach a consensus.

If you don't consume extra energy that serves no other purpose, then you don't have physical incentives to reach a consensus.
You don't spend energy on a vote, which means there might be no real person behind such a vote.

Energy consumption is the only reasonable way to tie physical to virtual, but either way, a certain physical consumption is necessary to insure physical beings are controlling a virtual currency.

[Quickseller]

Yea, many companies are researching how to use less electricity to check "one hash" and have made great strides over the years.

The fact that Bitcoin uses proof of work ("POW") means that finding blocks will be electric intensive, and over time the value of the electricity consumed by the miners will approach the value of the total block reward of the blocks.

If the POW were to be changed to proof of stake (users who hold Bitcoin find blocks), or to proof of something else, then electric consumption may decline.

[Ucy]

Am not technically sound when it comes to crypto/Blockchain stuff. But I guess I can relate it to familiar things, as physics methods could be Universal. We need to ask ourselves this question:
Can something of value be created/done without Energy?

 I think the discussion should be how to get Blockchains use Clean Energy rather than  eliminating the use of Energy itself.

The use of Energy is one of the few things that makes Crypto/Blockchain appear less of a Ponzi scheme.

[kernighan]

Some people think PoS is the answer, as it will provide confirmations with no extra energy consumptions.

I would argue that energy consumption is a feature, not a bug. That it is necessary and that if a blockchain isn't PoW, it isn't a blockchain.
Energy consumption required to solve cryptographic puzzles on Bitcoin blockchain is what ties the technology to the real world.
It is what gives people an identity, it is what stops spamming and gives people an incentive to reach a consensus.

If you don't consume extra energy that serves no other purpose, then you don't have physical incentives to reach a consensus.
You don't spend energy on a vote, which means there might be no real person behind such a vote.

Energy consumption is the only reasonable way to tie physical to virtual, but either way, a certain physical consumption is necessary to insure physical beings are controlling a virtual currency.

Only pow is blockchain? I doubt it.
The consensus not energy consumption is the essential.
Sx2 told us miners cannot control everything.

And we need avoid centralized mining.

[aleksej996]

Am not technically sound when it comes to crypto/Blockchain stuff. But I guess I can relate it to familiar things, as physics methods could be Universal. We need to ask ourselves this question:
Can something of value be created/done without Energy?

 I think the discussion should be how to get Blockchains use Clean Energy rather than  eliminating the use of Energy itself.

The use of Energy is one of the few things that makes Crypto/Blockchain appear less of a Ponzi scheme.

Anything that people give value is valuable. It has more to do with society then physics.
You can have people value a PoS coin as some of them exist and have a value, but the problem is the voting part.
The point is that if you don't need to do real physical work for your vote then you have no reason not to try to cheat the network.
Consensus must be energy consuming, otherwise you open new vectors of attack for little to no benefit.
I agree on Clean Energy, even cash is created from cutting down trees to make paper. Whole world should use Clean Energy, this isn't just a crypto thing.

Only pow is blockchain? I doubt it.
The consensus not energy consumption is the essential.
Sx2 told us miners cannot control everything.

And we need avoid centralized mining.

They are both essential as you can't have a fair consensus without consuming something to stop the spam.
I wouldn't call it a blockchain, because it has no benefit of it being structured as a blockchain, only costs.
It easy to see how a PoS coin doesn't need a blockchain, they just need to vote on the last chain state of the network, the rest is just taking up space and bandwidth. They have no security drawbacks by not using a blockchain, as the history of a chain state is trivial to produce in a PoS coin if you have control of a single chain state. It is just using a blockchain where it is not necessary. It is like banks bundling their transactions in blocks for no reason and calling it a blockchain.

[Monartis]

This is an area that is receiving increasing coverage, isn't it (the environmental issue)? Would be interested in learning more with regard to Bitcoin.

[wiebemarten]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Recently I read the whitepaper about Ripple's consensus mechanism.
Of course, it has slightly other invariants than Bitcoin. For instance, in Ripple, when less than 80% of the network is honest, no honest transactions can be sent so the network grinds to a halt. On the other hand, if less than 20% of the nodes is honest, malicious transactions could be stored permanently. In Bitcoin, 51% is enough to rule the network and there is not a lot of introspection to decide whether the majority is still honest.
Another 'problem' that Ripple has, is that all users need to have a good 'Unique Node List'. If the UNL is not a proper representation of the network as a whole, then it might be possible to game the system earlier.
On the other hand, because being thrown off of the UNL by many nodes is a very valid response to misbehaving that is very bad for the node that tried to cheat (you are now effectively excluded from the network), this seems to keep all nodes 'in check'.

I saw someone describe this this as 'Ripple allows you to shoot yourself in your foot. But it also allows you to react when someone tries to shoot you in the head'.


At least for me personally, Ripple, at least for financial transactions, seems to have the better method to go from transaction requests to an ordered transactions list.
Keep in mind though that I have not worked with Ripple directly myself, so I am not yet aware of the warts that it might have. (Usually warts of any language, framework, technology or tool are harder to find, because they are not as widely publicized and talked about).

Proof of Work is definitely an 'arms race' with no end and we need a replacement. I think we can all agree about that. It does not really matter for the security of the network if 100 nodes mine or 10000 nodes mine, but that the latter takes a whole lot more energy.

I believe there is a lot of research focused in this area right now. Besides Ripple, here is a list of other tech I happen to know of that is being worked on, including some notes about their current progress:

- - Proof of Stake: Still not mathematically proven enough to be acceptable. (Do note that there are multiple different variants of Proof of Stake that each work slightly differently)
- - Proof of Elapsed Time: Greatly hyped by HyperLedger, but it is proprietary technology by Intel that only works if you have a certain Intel chip, and places trust in the Intel company. I don't know enough about how this should work to know why it wouldn't be possible to e.g. make a fake hardware chip.
- - Proof of Burn. Not entirely sure how the progress is on this one.
- - The IOTA Tangle. Seems a very promising method to build a DAG rather than a chain. A problem of which I don't know how they want to solve it, is how it is prevented that new info is added as children of 'old' elements, essentially 'inserting something in the past'.
- - The Hashgraph. Currently closed source (the team does claim that it will be published as FOOS at some point though). Also builds a DAG in a different way than the Tangle does. It is easier to see how the network as a whole prevents 'insertions in the past'. What is not yet known, is how/or even if the Hashgraph can work in a public context; it currently requires a static number of nodes (where all nodes know each other at the start) and where a supermajority of nodes is online at all times. There are some vaguely-described extensions to this, but these do not explain how someone could join and leave at any time as people can do with other ledgers.

This list is by no means complete.

~Wiebe-Marten
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[Ucy]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Recently I read the whitepaper about Ripple's consensus mechanism.
Of course, it has slightly other invariants than Bitcoin. For instance, in Ripple, when less than 80% of the network is honest, no honest transactions can be sent so the network grinds to a halt. On the other hand, if less than 20% of the nodes is honest, malicious transactions could be stored permanently. In Bitcoin, 51% is enough to rule the network and there is not a lot of introspection to decide whether the majority is still honest.
Another 'problem' that Ripple has, is that all users need to have a good 'Unique Node List'. If the UNL is not a proper representation of the network as a whole, then it might be possible to game the system earlier.
On the other hand, because being thrown off of the UNL by many nodes is a very valid response to misbehaving that is very bad for the node that tried to cheat (you are now effectively excluded from the network), this seems to keep all nodes 'in check'.

I saw someone describe this this as 'Ripple allows you to shoot yourself in your foot. But it also allows you to react when someone tries to shoot you in the head'.


At least for me personally, Ripple, at least for financial transactions, seems to have the better method to go from transaction requests to an ordered transactions list.
Keep in mind though that I have not worked with Ripple directly myself, so I am not yet aware of the warts that it might have. (Usually warts of any language, framework, technology or tool are harder to find, because they are not as widely publicized and talked about).

Proof of Work is definitely an 'arms race' with no end and we need a replacement. I think we can all agree about that. It does not really matter for the security of the network if 100 nodes mine or 10000 nodes mine, but that the latter takes a whole lot more energy.

I believe there is a lot of research focused in this area right now. Besides Ripple, here is a list of other tech I happen to know of that is being worked on, including some notes about their current progress:

- - Proof of Stake: Still not mathematically proven enough to be acceptable. (Do note that there are multiple different variants of Proof of Stake that each work slightly differently)
- - Proof of Elapsed Time: Greatly hyped by HyperLedger, but it is proprietary technology by Intel that only works if you have a certain Intel chip, and places trust in the Intel company. I don't know enough about how this should work to know why it wouldn't be possible to e.g. make a fake hardware chip.
- - Proof of Burn. Not entirely sure how the progress is on this one.
- - The IOTA Tangle. Seems a very promising method to build a DAG rather than a chain. A problem of which I don't know how they want to solve it, is how it is prevented that new info is added as children of 'old' elements, essentially 'inserting something in the past'.
- - The Hashgraph. Currently closed source (the team does claim that it will be published as FOOS at some point though). Also builds a DAG in a different way than the Tangle does. It is easier to see how the network as a whole prevents 'insertions in the past'. What is not yet known, is how/or even if the Hashgraph can work in a public context; it currently requires a static number of nodes (where all nodes know each other at the start) and where a supermajority of nodes is online at all times. There are some vaguely-described extensions to this, but these do not explain how someone could join and leave at any time as people can do with other ledgers.

This list is by no means complete.

~Wiebe-Marten
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More on Hashgraph:
 Based on Hashgraph concensus. The creators claimed it is 50,000 faster than Bitcoin Blockchain and would also allow Smart Phones to act as Nodes.
Article on Hashgraph:
https://breathepublication.com/blockchain-just-became-obsolete-the-future-is-hashgraph-de4948609cbf

 

[TechPriest]

To be honest I can't call Ripple "cryptocurrency". It is most like securities united with Paypal. There is no block or decentralized nodes. It's the same to existing bank system.

[wiebemarten]

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To be honest I can't call Ripple "cryptocurrency". It is most like securities united with Paypal. There is no block or decentralized nodes. It's the same to existing bank system.

What do you mean?

Ripple does have 'blocks', but in Ripple parlance they are called 'ledgers':

- - Transactions compete to be part of the next ledger.
- - Once a majority of nodes agrees on a set of transactions, a new ledger is created and propagated through all of the network.
- - The ledger contains a list of transactions, a reference hash to the previous ledger (building a merkle chain) as well as the changed 'state' of the system, similar to how Ethereum's system changes state. This ensures that all nodes can verify locally that the listed transactions indeed result in the given state change, making forks (near?) impossible.

Nodes are definitely decentralized in Ripple:
- - Everyone can run their own node.
- - Nodes can connect to any other node. In fact, users can configure which other nodes they want to connect to exactly.

Also, I am not really sure what "securities united with Paypal" looks like. Could you give some more information on this?

~Wiebe-Marten

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[aleksej996]

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To be honest I can't call Ripple "cryptocurrency". It is most like securities united with Paypal. There is no block or decentralized nodes. It's the same to existing bank system.

What do you mean?

Ripple does have 'blocks', but in Ripple parlance they are called 'ledgers':

- - Transactions compete to be part of the next ledger.
- - Once a majority of nodes agrees on a set of transactions, a new ledger is created and propagated through all of the network.
- - The ledger contains a list of transactions, a reference hash to the previous ledger (building a merkle chain) as well as the changed 'state' of the system, similar to how Ethereum's system changes state. This ensures that all nodes can verify locally that the listed transactions indeed result in the given state change, making forks (near?) impossible.

Nodes are definitely decentralized in Ripple:
- - Everyone can run their own node.
- - Nodes can connect to any other node. In fact, users can configure which other nodes they want to connect to exactly.

Also, I am not really sure what "securities united with Paypal" looks like. Could you give some more information on this?

~Wiebe-Marten

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I am curious, do these ledgers have all the balances of every address on them? Or just the new transactions?
It seems to me like it would have the same security if the ledgers just stored balances instead of transactions which isn't the case for PoW chains.
There would be no need for the old ledgers then. You can just have the most recent one. And poof goes the blockchain.
It is just a SWIFT system now where anyone can be a bank, right?

[wiebemarten]

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I am curious, do these ledgers have all the balances of every address on them? Or just the new transactions?
It seems to me like it would have the same security if the ledgers just stored balances instead of transactions which isn't the case for PoW chains.
There would be no need for the old ledgers then. You can just have the most recent one. And poof goes the blockchain.
It is just a SWIFT system now where anyone can be a bank, right?

The security between these two is not the same because when you do not store the transactions that caused a change, you lose the ability to audit what happened.


Ripple stores both the transactions as well as the effects the transactions had on the global state of the network. (See Ripple Tech Talk: Understanding Consensus (Mar 2015) for an in-depth description, this is covered at 22:34).

~Wiebe-Marten


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[omashi]

Bram Cohen proposed Proof of Storage scheme vs Proof of Work sometime ago..

[TechPriest]

To be honest I can't call Ripple "cryptocurrency". It is most like securities united with Paypal. There is no block or decentralized nodes. It's the same to existing bank system.

What do you mean?

Ripple does have 'blocks', but in Ripple parlance they are called 'ledgers':

- - Transactions compete to be part of the next ledger.
- - Once a majority of nodes agrees on a set of transactions, a new ledger is created and propagated through all of the network.
- - The ledger contains a list of transactions, a reference hash to the previous ledger (building a merkle chain) as well as the changed 'state' of the system, similar to how Ethereum's system changes state. This ensures that all nodes can verify locally that the listed transactions indeed result in the given state change, making forks (near?) impossible.

Nodes are definitely decentralized in Ripple:
- - Everyone can run their own node.
- - Nodes can connect to any other node. In fact, users can configure which other nodes they want to connect to exactly.

Everyone can run their own node in Bitcoin. If he has enough money of course.
The second statement it's not good, 'cause in bitcoin you can choose only numbers of inbound and outbound connections, without knowledge WHO connected to you.
Also, as i know Ripple has private transactions which are not recorded to main "blockchain". It's not good.

[Borilla]

I believe there is a lot of research focused in this area right now. Besides Ripple, here is a list of other tech I happen to know of that is being worked on, including some notes about their current progress:

- - Proof of Stake: Still not mathematically proven enough to be acceptable. (Do note that there are multiple different variants of Proof of Stake that each work slightly differently)
- - Proof of Elapsed Time: Greatly hyped by HyperLedger, but it is proprietary technology by Intel that only works if you have a certain Intel chip, and places trust in the Intel company. I don't know enough about how this should work to know why it wouldn't be possible to e.g. make a fake hardware chip.
- - Proof of Burn. Not entirely sure how the progress is on this one.
- - The IOTA Tangle. Seems a very promising method to build a DAG rather than a chain. A problem of which I don't know how they want to solve it, is how it is prevented that new info is added as children of 'old' elements, essentially 'inserting something in the past'.
- - The Hashgraph. Currently closed source (the team does claim that it will be published as FOOS at some point though). Also builds a DAG in a different way than the Tangle does. It is easier to see how the network as a whole prevents 'insertions in the past'. What is not yet known, is how/or even if the Hashgraph can work in a public context; it currently requires a static number of nodes (where all nodes know each other at the start) and where a supermajority of nodes is online at all times. There are some vaguely-described extensions to this, but these do not explain how someone could join and leave at any time as people can do with other ledgers.

This list is by no means complete.


breathepublication.com/blockchain-just-became-obsolete-the-future-is-hashgraph-de4948609cbf

 

interesting
Would it be possible to implement Bitcoin with one or a mix of these? any plan in the future ?
I just find it strange all the talks about fees but so little for the elephant in the room

[Carlton Banks]

I just find it strange all the talks about fees but so little for the elephant in the room

You haven't explained why energy consumption is such a problem for you.

The miners are naturally incentivised to get as many hashes per second for their available watts of electricity as possible, as this means they have a higher chance of solving a block. Don't you think that the miners are aware of the issue also?

[Borilla]

You haven't explained why energy consumption is such a problem for you.

because i have a consciousness and many hesitant adopters too

because economically  btc transactions cost way more in electricity than their fees and btc owners pay them all indirectly

sorry I thought all these were obvious

[Carlton Banks]

because i have a consciousness and many hesitant adopters too

because economically  btc transactions cost way more in electricity than their fees and btc owners pay them all indirectly

sorry I thought all these were obvious

Re: "Consciousness" - It's probably better to leave religious beliefs or politics out of the Development & Technical sub-forum, that would be off-topic.


Re: the costs of producing a block - you've misunderstood the economics.

The fees don't pay for the block reward, the miners are incurring the electricity costs in order to profitably mine the block reward + transaction fees (profiting from transaction fees is in most respects out of the miner's control). The vast majority of the electricity used to solve a block must (at this stage of the block subsidy decrement schedule) be comparable to the market price of the block reward in order for it to be profitable for the miner. The miner cannot continue mining if they pay more to mine the block reward than the block reward can be sold for. The transaction fees are a largely insubstantial part of how a miner evaluates profitable operation, as fees are a small proportion of the block reward's BTC value.

Do you have a different economic model in mind?

[xdrpx]

There could be several possibilities on how we could solve the energy crisis of miners. I'm guessing you might have taken a hint from China planning to charge premium prices for Bitcoin miners, or to have their power sources cut down. This could be all because of the extreme amount of power being consumed for mining, which could otherwise be used for powering rural households generated by hydroelectricity.

With Proof of Work and current hardware available out there, it's very competitive and only the top performing hardware wins the block mining battle. Hence, it becomes necessary that ASIC chip manufactuters focus on reducing power consumption of these chips while retaining performance if at all we want to reduce power consumption. For instant just one of the T9's and the S9's easily alone draw about 1400 Watts of electricity which is too much. Thus it's all a matter of competition building up for ASIC chip manufacturers for Bitcoin mining, and then we'll see a lot of innovation in this area and soon probably low power consuming miners.

There are other algorithms that most altcoins are planning to switch to or have already been running on, such as Proof of stake which risks centralization and power in the hands of those having the high stake of funds, which would obvious make the rich richer. So I'm honestly not expecting the logical thinkers to be a great fan of this.