bitcoin can be made efficient and less energy consuming?

[cafter]

how can Bitcoin be made more efficient and secure without using too much electricity ?,

the current way of confirming transactions, called "proof of work" , uses a lot of energy, so may many people are looking for other ways to do it. is there are some other ways we could do it ? , and
what are the pros and cons of each? how do we make sure that the new way is still secure and that bad people can't cheat the system?

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[BlackHatCoiner]

No yet known with the advantages of Proof-of-Work. First things first, no other mechanism gives solution to the well known Byzantine generals' problem. This means that no other mechanism is objective; Proof-of-Stake, which is the second most known mechanism introduces subjectivity into play.

the current way of confirming transactions, called "proof of work" , uses a lot of energy

There isn't, and there is unlikely to be one with the same advantages of Proof-of-Work. Instead of spending hours to figure out such a mechanism, why can't we accept that good things require good amounts of energy to work?

[Lucius]

how can Bitcoin be made more efficient and secure without using too much electricity ?,

the current way of confirming transactions, called "proof of work" , uses a lot of energy, so may many people are looking for other ways to do it. is there are some other ways we could do it ? ,

Too much/lot of energy are just empty words if you don't have some objective data to show. When you read various articles that claim that Bitcoin consumes too much energy, do they say that this share is 0.5%. maybe 1% or 5% of the total electricity consumption? According to some data, energy losses at the world level in one year are about 50 000 TWh, and someone correct me if I'm wrong, Bitcoin does not consume more than 300 TWh per year at the moment.

It may seem like a lot, but in fact it is not, and I will ask the question : "Would the world be a nicer and greener place if those 300 TWh were consumed by banks, Christmas and New Year lights, or if they were simply lost in the grid?"

[bitmover]

the current way of confirming transactions, called "proof of work" , uses a lot of energy, so may many people are looking for other ways to do it.

I doubt those are the reasons.

People are finding alternatives to create a centralized cryptocurrency, which will not destroy banks and will not allow users to make censorship resistance transactions, borderless, permitionless, and private.

Those characteristics  of bitcoin is making governments worried, so they are creating this false green dilema on bitcoin.

[cafter]

how can Bitcoin be made more efficient and secure without using too much electricity ?,

the current way of confirming transactions, called "proof of work" , uses a lot of energy, so may many people are looking for other ways to do it. is there are some other ways we could do it ? ,

Too much/lot of energy are just empty words if you don't have some objective data to show. When you read various articles that claim that Bitcoin consumes too much energy, do they say that this share is 0.5%. maybe 1% or 5% of the total electricity consumption? According to some data, energy losses at the world level in one year are about 50 000 TWh, and someone correct me if I'm wrong, Bitcoin does not consume more than 300 TWh per year at the moment.

It may seem like a lot, but in fact it is not, and I will ask the question : "Would the world be a nicer and greener place if those 300 TWh were consumed by banks, Christmas and New Year lights, or if they were simply lost in the grid?"

bitcoin energy consumption :


world energy consumption :

i am comparing with transport x bitcoin ,
transport have around 420TWH  and bitcoin have around : 97TWH
does it seems high or low ?
i don't know the websites are right or not

source : https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption#:~:text=The%20article%20highlights%20that%20the,gCO2%2FkWh%20in%20August%202021.
          : https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-overview/electricity-consumption

[thecodebear]

Energy consumption of Bitcoin is not a problem. In fact its a very good thing! It creates an energy economy for wasted energy that will allow the world to stop wasting tons of energy. Energy production wastes tons of energy to keep the lights on at all times by overproducing. Bitcoin is gonna soak up all that wasted energy and put it to good economic value by 'storing' it in monetary form - satoshis. This is a huge win for the world.

Plus it will greatly help renewable energy production become more economically viable than fossil fuels. Another win for the world!



The world with Bitcoin wastes far less energy and energy production as a whole becomes more profitable meaning fewer places in the world energy problems, and we also transition to renewables more quickly thus saving human civilization from worse effects of climate change.

The world without Bitcoin continues wasting enormous amounts of energy, energy production stays as profitable as it has been, and we transition to renewables more slowly.



The negatives of energy use in bitcoin mining are purely optics: it just LOOKS bad. But it is in fact a VERY GOOD thing for the world. We don't need to do anything to lower the energy consumption of Bitcoin, in fact it would be a bad thing if we did that! All we need to do is get the public educated on the benefits of Bitcoin mining and understanding why what they've been led to believe about PoW is dead wrong. There is no energy problem with Bitcoin, there's just an education and misinformation problem.


The idea that Bitcoin should use less energy is simply a misunderstanding of the effects that Bitcoin mining has on the world. It is a failure to see the benefits while falsely identifying negatives. Unfortunately it is that falsely identified negative that is the most obviously stated thing that pops up when doing a surface-level analysis of PoW mining. It's one of those things in life where the obvious conclusion is dead wrong and you can only get to the correct conclusion by having a good understanding of the systems at play.

[oryhp]

Rather than seeing the energy consumption as a problem, we should see it as a solution. The energy consumption of Bitcoin is its security. If you do away with energy or reduce it, you change the security model.

You can secure the order of transactions with a virtual or physical resource.

Bitcoin chooses the latter and secures the chain as long as the majority of computations are directed at the honest chain. We know computations require energy to execute and because we're doing so many computations (300 exa/s), this consumes a ton of energy (physical resource) that secures our chain.
Here comes the interesting part. If you want to secure yourself from really high energy attacks (e.g. state-level energy attacks), you have no choice but to combat them with higher energy. Thus, Bitcoin consuming energy levels of countries is really the only way to keep it *really* secure from large scale attacks.

You could argue that instead of energy, we can use other resources from the physical world like space and time. Some consensus attempts try to use these, but my intuition is that it can't possibly have the same level of "hardness" or "cost" to it because space doesn't really "move" around and hence there's no work to it. Admittedly, this is very layman view and I never really looked at how exactly they try to achieve this.

Chains like Ethereum secure the order with a virtual resource called a coin. This resource is completely disconnected from the physical world. Some would argue they are connected because we can have physical consequences (e.g. prison time in case of a theft), but this is just our interpretation of it. The resource itself is inherently disconnected from the physical world because it's defined inside this made up system itself. As a consequence, it comes with no real physical cost and no physical constraints. The reason why you may want to have physical constraints is because the world we live in is a system we don't know how to exploit, at least not yet. This means leaders/countries don't have magic knobs to bend the rules and gain an advantage. Physical world is objectively fair, it encodes no assigned ranks or leader positions.

[hZti]

What people do not like is that bitcoin energy consumption is „pointless“ by design. I have not seen any preposition on how to resolve this issue and put in a new protocol that is more secure however. Still IF there is a option that offers the same security with no energy consumption, I’m shure it would be a huge success.

[thecodebear]

What people do not like is that bitcoin energy consumption is „pointless“ by design. I have not seen any preposition on how to resolve this issue and put in a new protocol that is more secure however. Still IF there is a option that offers the same security with no energy consumption, I’m shure it would be a huge success.

But then the world would lose all the unique benefits to society that we get thanks to Bitcoin using energy. Bitcoin can allow society to stop wasting a lot of electricity and make renewable resources cheaper. Moving away from PoW would take away those benefits. Even if there was another option that was just as secure and decentralized as PoW, it would hurt society to move away from it. PoW provides tremendous benefits to society, as I explained in my post above. The idea that Bitcoin using energy is bad is a misconception. The fact that Bitcoin uses energy is very beneficial to society even if we aren't even talking about its use as Bitcoin's security mechanism. Anyone who says PoW is pointless or bad for the environment doesn't have an understanding of how it works.

[tromp]

Let's not forget that PoW serves another equally important purpose besides consensus:

PoW is required for fair distribution of coins.

Note that I'm not saying that PoW suffices for fair distribution of coins.
You can still get wealth concentration from premines, instamines, fastmines, mining tax, and so on.

But without PoW you definitely get wealth concentration... weakening decentralization.

[Z-tight]

how can Bitcoin be made more efficient and secure without using too much electricity ?,

Why do we need another way when the current one is working very fine, and the network is very secure with it. Do not fix what's not broken, there is no serious, lives threatning or universal endagering problem with pow, what you see online about pow destroying the enviroment is just propaganda. It does not use more energy than many other sectors, but it does far more good than most of them, so we should ask ourselves if the fingers are being pointed in the right direction.

[hZti]

Let's not forget that PoW serves another equally important purpose besides consensus:

PoW is required for fair distribution of coins.

Note that I'm not saying that PoW suffices for fair distribution of coins.
You can still get wealth concentration from premines, instamines, fastmines, mining tax, and so on.

But without PoW you definitely get wealth concentration... weakening decentralization.

It even benefits poor countries because they usually have cheap electricity. For example for rich parts of Europe you can basically not mine bitcoin for a profit, so people will not do it. Because of this people in poor countries can mine more bitcoin than they would usually mine, simply because they are favored by electricity costs.

[SamReomo]

how can Bitcoin be made more efficient and secure without using too much electricity ?,

the current way of confirming transactions, called "proof of work" , uses a lot of energy, so may many people are looking for other ways to do it. is there are some other ways we could do it ? , and
what are the pros and cons of each? how do we make sure that the new way is still secure and that bad people can't cheat the system?

Bitcoin is already an energy-efficient, and  the best way to mine Bitcoins is through proof of work. Any serious Bitcoin enthusiast would never consider any other method to verify transactions. It is the most reliable and efficient system in the market for validating transactions, and it uses energy for a good cause. The energy that some may try to conserve will ultimately be wasted in one way or another. It is better to utilize that energy for a good purpose such as the mining of Bitcoins.

Another mechanism to validate transactions is Proof of Stake but it is not suitable for everyone. This method favors those who already have a plenty of coins can benefit from staking those coins to increase their amount. However, it does not offer any significant advantages for those who would use their available electricity to mine coins. Undoubtedly, proof of work remains the optimal choice for the majority of Bitcoin users..

[ABCbits]

--snip--

It even benefits poor countries because they usually have cheap electricity. For example for rich parts of Europe you can basically not mine bitcoin for a profit, so people will not do it. Because of this people in poor countries can mine more bitcoin than they would usually mine, simply because they are favored by electricity costs.

But it's not because they're poor. Usually it's due to subsidy or large supply of energy source.

--snip--

Bitcoin is already an energy-efficient, and  the best way to mine Bitcoins is through proof of work.

Rather than best way, PoW is the only option with current Bitcoin protocol.

Any serious Bitcoin enthusiast would never consider any other method to verify transactions. It is the most reliable and efficient system in the market for validating transactions, and it uses energy for a good cause.

Wrong, any serious/knowledgeable Bitcoin enthusiast know transaction verification is performed by all node where miner decide which transaction should be included on block they'll mine.

[darkv0rt3x]

how can Bitcoin be made more efficient and secure without using too much electricity ?,

the current way of confirming transactions, called "proof of work" , uses a lot of energy, so may many people are looking for other ways to do it. is there are some other ways we could do it ? ,

Too much/lot of energy are just empty words if you don't have some objective data to show. When you read various articles that claim that Bitcoin consumes too much energy, do they say that this share is 0.5%. maybe 1% or 5% of the total electricity consumption? According to some data, energy losses at the world level in one year are about 50 000 TWh, and someone correct me if I'm wrong, Bitcoin does not consume more than 300 TWh per year at the moment.

It may seem like a lot, but in fact it is not, and I will ask the question : "Would the world be a nicer and greener place if those 300 TWh were consumed by banks, Christmas and New Year lights, or if they were simply lost in the grid?"

OP, and to add to this, let's see yet another standpoint.
One of the properties of hard money is that the ratio of new Bitcoin coming into circulation must not be significant when compared to the one already in circulation. Or yet in other words, it must be hard to get new Bitcoin into circulation so that the existing Bitcoin doesn't lose value with the new Bitcoin entering the circuit! If not, flooding the market with easy "harvastable" Bitcoin would deflate the whole thing and we would be in the same situations as with fiat.

So, to be hard/costly to get new Bitcoin, is a feature and we need to keep it that way. And if in the future we can think of a way of shifting from energy to some other resource, the hardness of harvesting that new resource must be kept.

[d5000]

I have a slightly diverging opinion on this issue.

First, like all others who posted here, I believe PoW to be the best, and above all, the most "objective" method to mine blocks and protect from double spends. And I believe Bitcoin can prevail using only PoW, hopefully driving miners progressively into renewable energies.

But the algorithm could, in theory, probably be improved adding other elements. The big problem of PoS and other "alternative" methods like Proof-of-Capacity (PoC), the nothing-and-stake problem, means essentially that we can't calculate the security they deliver properly (even if shitcoins like Cardano claim so) due to different attacks with a cost which is difficult to measure (node/min[t]er bribing, min[t]er collusion, liveness attacks), above all if we take potential profits into account (i.e. by short selling a PoS currency).

That these methods do generate some security, however, is without doubts - PoS and PoC currencies seem widely doing well. Most of them have centralization problems, but not all (Peercoin, Signum, Blackcoin and Slimcoin are highly decentralized cryptocurrencies with at least some PoS or PoC component). The problem is, again, that we don't know how much it would cost to attack them if we take bribing, long-term and short-term N@S, and attacks on PBFT via miner cartels into account.

Where I'm heading to - I believe a slight PoS contribution to a Bitcoin-like PoW algorithm (what we know popularly as "PoW/PoS") could, in theory, deliver a better security/energy consumption equation. Ethereum had planned that for some months, but they ditched the idea to switch to a pure (PBFT-)PoS algorithm.

I however believe that it's too late to change Bitcoin's algorithm, and such a change would be highly controversial and most likely generate a fork. So, as I wrote above, this is a purely theoretic opinion, no drama necessary.

[Davidvictorson]

the current way of confirming transactions, called "proof of work" , uses a lot of energy, so may many people are looking for other ways to do it.

We are aware that the proof-of-work algorithm's claimed energy consumption is disputed and overstated. Because they are working so hard to trash bitcoin, I personally do not believe the data from Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI), Digiconomist,  or International Energy Agency (IEA). However, I believe that cost-effective alternatives that can greatly lower the energy consumption of the proof-of-work algorithm include biomass, solar, wind, and geothermal energy.  There are various more advantages to these alternatives, both for the environment and the proof-of-work.

[Synchronice]

how can Bitcoin be made more efficient and secure without using too much electricity ?,

the current way of confirming transactions, called "proof of work" , uses a lot of energy, so may many people are looking for other ways to do it. is there are some other ways we could do it ? , and
what are the pros and cons of each? how do we make sure that the new way is still secure and that bad people can't cheat the system?

The idea of Proof Of Work is to have as decentralized system as possible. We have an alternative called Proof Of Stack. While PoS is more efficient, fast, eco-friendly, it's still not a good solution because the way PoS works is that those who are an early adopters and have more money, control the game.

I think that proof of work has more benefits outside of bitcoin too. PoW lead to development of Application-Specific Integrated Circuit, i.e. to development of part of science because ASIC chip production requires research and hard work.
Also, you can't just sit with your money and control the game. It requires a lot of work and activity to develop & produce mining equipment, to sell/buy them, to host them and then take care of them. This process at some points keeps you in shape and instead of sitting with full wallet, you have to actually work to achieve it. At least that's how I see this process.

By the way, Bitcoin isn't something that kills nature. If we think this way, then we have to admit that website hosting produces a lot of co2 which is dangerous for our environment, let's say no to web hosting and online business and move in real world. It's okay if you go by bicycle and buy your flight ticket in station. Let's say no to online banking, delete your app and move by bicycle in your bank and do transactions manually from their office.
Let's don't play video games on your PC and gaming console because GPU & CPU produce a lot of carbon dioxide.

Let's be frank, deal is not to shut down everything, we have to find a solution. I would say that bitcoin can be made more efficient and less energy consuming, I can say the same about everything that consumes energy, there may come time when we will reduce energy consumption or we will find a better solution.

Nikola Tesla was against centralized coal-fired power stations that emitted co2 and I genuinely believe he had a solution but in a capitalistic world only money matters.

[mikeywith]

deliver a better security/energy consumption equation.

You are going to need to define what "better energy consumption equation" actually means!  is "less" better? I could argue that more is better, economies grow and prosper due to demand and not lack thereof, Bitcoin's need for energy creates demand, creates jobs, and overall strengthens the economy in a lot of ways, so the more energy Bitcoin uses the better for everyone.

[d5000]

You are going to need to define what "better energy consumption equation" actually means!  is "less" better? I could argue that more is better, economies grow and prosper due to demand and not lack thereof, Bitcoin's need for energy creates demand, creates jobs, and overall strengthens the economy in a lot of ways, so the more energy Bitcoin uses the better for everyone.

Of course "less energy consumption" is better.

Your argument makes not really sense, because avoidable energy consumption is not correlated with "job creation" or "economy strength". Jobs can be created even with technology that leads to a lower energy consumption (i.e. creating more efficient automobiles and housing with less heating requirements). I'm convinced the strongest economies will be those with the most sustainable and efficient energy consumption habits. They have less dependencies on other countries (see the problematic relation between Russia and Europe), less needs for subsidies in the case of high energy price bubbles, less import costs, etc.

The only way there is a correlation is the other way around: you can of course create jobs which lead to a consumption of energy. But in Bitcoin mining this is not the case: mining farms are mostly automated.

There is one positive effect of Bitcoin mining which can be beneficial and has been cited: if they use mostly renewable sources, then that can help to upscale renewables equipment production, e.g. the solar cells and wind turbines industry. But I think this effect is minimal, there is so much energy demand for other uses, and CO₂ certificates price rise all the time, so the demand for renewables is growing in an accelerated pace even without Bitcoin's intervention.