Add Ethereum energy consumption page #3650
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jmcook1186
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Hey @jmcook1186 - spoke to in DMs but to re-iterate this is a really strong start ✌️ I've left some comments for suggested changes.
One change that we'll have to make before publishing this is removing references to 'Eth2' as the term is being deprecated. (but we can iterate on this)
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| # Introduction to Ethereum's Energy Consumption {#introduction-to-ethereum-energy-consumption} | ||
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| Since inception, sustainability has been a core value for Ethereum. However, until recently sustainability has sat uncomfortably alongside two other core values: security and scaleability. This page will explain why building out Ethereum to its current state has required a significant upfront carbon cost and why Ethereum is now on the cusp of becoming a truly low-carbon blockchain without undermining its other core principles. |
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Since inception, sustainability has been a core value for Ethereum.
I don't think we should be making generalised statements like this. PoS was always in the plan but calling sustainability a core value seems inaccurate.
| Since inception, sustainability has been a core value for Ethereum. However, until recently sustainability has sat uncomfortably alongside two other core values: security and scaleability. This page will explain why building out Ethereum to its current state has required a significant upfront carbon cost and why Ethereum is now on the cusp of becoming a truly low-carbon blockchain without undermining its other core principles. | |
| Since inception, sustainability has been a core value for Ethereum. However, until recently sustainability has sat uncomfortably alongside two other core values: security and scalability. This page will explain why building out Ethereum to its current state has required a significant upfront carbon cost and why Ethereum is now on the cusp of becoming a truly low-carbon blockchain without undermining its other core principles. |
| ## Energy secures the network {energy-secures-the-network} | ||
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| Transactions on the Ethereum blockchain are validated by miners. Miners are node operators who bundle together transactions from the mempool into ordered blocks, which are added to the Ethereum blockchain. The new blocks are broadcast to all the other node operators who run the transactions independently and verify that the checksum generated by the miner proposing the block agrees with their own. Since the checksum is generated based on the entire history of the chain, any dishonesty shows up as an inconsistency in the checksums generated by different nodes. Assuming the checksums are verified, the block is added to the blockchain on every node. If the checksums do not match up, the blockchain forks, and after a few blocks the valid branch is assumed to be the one with the longest valid chain. | ||
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| This only works if there is a cost associated with minign and some unpredictability about which specific node submits the next block. These conditions are met by imposing proof-of-work (PoW). To be eligible to submit a block of transactions a miner must solve an arbitrary computational puzzle faster than any other miner. This creates competition between miners and cost in the form of energy expenditure. In order to successfully defraud the blockchain, a dishonest node operator would have to consistently win the race to solve the PoW puzzle which is both very unlikely and prohibitively expensive. PoW is therefore a way to secure the network. By requiring proof of computational work, PoW underpins the longest-chain consensus mechanism that ensures validity of the blockchain. | ||
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| Ethereum has implemented the PoW protocol since its inception. While migration away from PoW has always been a fundamental goal of Ethereum, it has also arguably been the most philosophically and technologically challenging because the viable alternatives all required some compromise in one of Ethereum's core principles. |
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This is good but should be tackled from a slightly higher level. Seems like it intends to be directed to beginners but them makes assumptions about mempools and blocks. For learn pages, where possible, I'd lean towards not getting into the technicals too much.
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| ## PoS energy expenditure | ||
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| As well as building confidence in the PoS mechanism, the Beacon Chain also enables estimates of Ethereum's post-merge energy usage. A recent [blog post on this site](https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-power-no-more/) suggested that the merge to PoS could result in a 99.95% reduction in total energy use, with PoS being ~2000x more efficient than PoS. The energy-expenditure of Ethereum will be roughly equal to the cost of running a home computer for each node on the network, estimated to be about 5,250,000kWh per year for a network of 10,000 nodes. |
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Over time, this prices miners out of the market, tending towards centralisation
- Not sure we can/should make the PoS is more/less centralised than PoW argument...
- Don't think the focus on this matters on this page
| We can use this data to compare Eth2 to a global service like Visa. 100,000 Visa transactions uses 149kWh of energy<sup>[^2]</sup>. In Eth2, that same number of transactions would cost 17.4kWh of energy or ~11% of the total energy<sup>[^3]</sup>. That's without considering the many optimisations being worked on in parallel to Eth2, like [rollups](/glossary/#rollups). It could be as little as 0.1666666667kWh of energy for 100,000 transactions. | ||
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| It's estimated that Eth2 will allow the network to process between 25,000 and [100,000 transactions per second](https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1312905884549300224?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1312905886327664640%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es2_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.coinspeaker.com%2Fvitalik-buterin-ethereum-layer-2%2F), with [100,000 as the theoretical maximum right now](https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-rollup-centric-ethereum-roadmap/4698). | ||
| At the bare minimum, Eth2 will allow 64 times the amount of transactions as today which sits at around 15 transactions. That's the amount of shard chains (extra data and capacity) being introduced ([More on shard chains](/eth2/shard-chains/)). That means we can conservatively estimate how long it will take to process 100,000 transactions so we can compare it to the Visa example above. |
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| At the bare minimum, Eth2 will allow 64 times the amount of transactions as today which sits at around 15 transactions. That's the amount of shard chains (extra data and capacity) being introduced ([More on shard chains](/eth2/shard-chains/)). That means we can conservatively estimate how long it will take to process 100,000 transactions so we can compare it to the Visa example above. | |
| At a minimum, Eth2 will allow 64 times the amount of transactions as today which sits at around 15 transactions. That's the number of [shard chains](/eth2/shard-chains/) (extra data and capacity) being introduced. That means we can conservatively estimate how long it will take to process 100,000 transactions so we can compare it to the Visa example above. |
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Also: we should probably be explaining that shared chains allow this growth (not anything else in the eth2 updates) especially because we're moving away from the ETH2 branding
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| _It’s also important to remember that Ethereum does more than just financial transactions, it’s a platform for applications, so a fairer comparison might be to many companies/industries including Visa, AWS and more!_ | ||
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| ## Criticism |
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Criticism
I don't think the centralisation argument is all that relevant to a user who wants to know about how much energy Ethereum uses. I'd probably lean towards dropping this whole section.
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| ## The merge | ||
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| There is now a functional PoS blockchain called the [Beacon Chain]("https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/beacon-chain/") that has been running since December 2020 that is demonstrating the viability of the PoS protocol. Now that the ["London Upgrade"](https://ethereum.org/en/history/#london) has been successfully implemented, the switch from PoW to Pos (known as "the merge") is the next major update coming to Ethereum with a target date of late 2021 - early 2022. The merge to PoS will also bring associated efficiency gains through "sharding" the blockchain into sub-chains and accelerating the adoption of "roll-ups" (collections of transactions settled cheaply off-chain then pushed to the Ethereum blockchain as a single batch transaction). |
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as been successfully implemented, the switch from PoW to Pos (known as "the merge") is the next major update coming to Ethereum with a target date of late 2021 - early 2022.
Altair is before the Merge
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The merge to PoS will also bring associated efficiency gains through "sharding" the blockchain into sub-chains
The merge will happen before shard chains now
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accelerating the adoption of "roll-ups"
Not sure what you mean by this. I don't see the merge and roll ups as being linked?
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Ok, I amended the page according to the review comments - agree with everything, of course. Also noticed that the calculations of energy consumption per 100k transactions that were inherited from the previous version of the page assumed 10k validators which seems to me to be over an order of magnitude too low. I updated them assuming 200k validators, which i think gives a conservative estimate. Also rewrote this section to make it (hopefully) more readable. Thanks! |
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Hey @jmcook1186 made some more edits. FYI I've suggested the edits above (You can just click 'Commit suggestion' if you agree with the changes) - we recently released a style guide where we decided to use proof-of-work over PoW consistently to reduce user cognitive load (i.e. they don't have to remember recently learned terms). |
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Hi, agree with all edits - thanks! |
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Waiting on another team member to review (early next week?) |
| sidebar: true | ||
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| Ethereum's current energy expenditure is too high and unsustainable. Resolving energy expenditure concerns without sacrificing security and decentralization has been a significant technical challenge for Ethereum's development. Let's explore why building Ethereum has had a high environmental impact and how upcoming network upgrades will dramatically change this. |
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Ethereum's current energy expenditure is too high and unsustainable.
Agree with the sentiment here but I'm not sure leading this page with a subjective statement is the right approach. It's "too high" - according to who? It's "unsustainable" - is it? Smells like someones opinion.
I'd suggest focusing more on factual statements. e.g. "Ethereum's current energy expenditure is significant - comparable to the power consumption of a small country". We could potentially link out to sources here (e.g. https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption/ though I'm not sure this is an authoritative source).
"Overall, Ethereum represents around 0.1% of global electricity" might be another useful stat for context:
https://kylemcdonald.github.io/ethereum-emissions/
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Agree.
Maybe a more high-level critique about the intro and the order, I wish the article started with explaining the reduced energy impact under PoS and then went lightly into the temporary impact we have under PoW (sort of how Carl's article did). Our current situation is temporary after all ... it's kind of like we're burying the lead by putting the PoS information at the bottom.
I think a quick remedy could be putting a tl;dr that links to Carl's article at the top, something that says like:
TL;DR: Ethereum will use at least ~99.95% less energy with the transition to Proof of Stake. Read more [here](https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-power-no-more/).
Would be cool if that had it's own box to stand our, sort of like on the history page:
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| _It's not entirely accurate to compare based on number of transactions as Ethereum's energy usage is time-based. The energy usage of Ethereum is the same in 1 minute regardless if it does 1 or 1,000 transactions._ | ||
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| _We must also consider that Ethereum isn't limited to simple financial transactions but is also a complete platform built for smart contracts and decentralized applications._ |
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I feel like we could merge this sentence into the one above, as a set of italicized disclaimers.
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Solid work! Really appreciate this PR 💚
I've suggested some small tweaks & requested a few changes. A few more things in addition that perhaps @minimalsm we can quickly make after merging.
- We should (probably?) add nav/footer links to this page
- We need to add a breadcrumbs string
- filename should be energy-consumption not energy_consumption to keep URLs consistent
Co-authored-by: Sam Richards <sbrichards@gmail.com>
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| Ethereum's current energy expenditure is too high and unsustainable. Resolving energy expenditure concerns without sacrificing security and decentralization has been a significant technical challenge for Ethereum's development. Let's explore why building Ethereum has had a high environmental impact and how upcoming network upgrades will dramatically change this. |
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Agree.
Maybe a more high-level critique about the intro and the order, I wish the article started with explaining the reduced energy impact under PoS and then went lightly into the temporary impact we have under PoW (sort of how Carl's article did). Our current situation is temporary after all ... it's kind of like we're burying the lead by putting the PoS information at the bottom.
I think a quick remedy could be putting a tl;dr that links to Carl's article at the top, something that says like:
TL;DR: Ethereum will use at least ~99.95% less energy with the transition to Proof of Stake. Read more [here](https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-power-no-more/).
Would be cool if that had it's own box to stand our, sort of like on the history page:
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Hey @skylarweaver, thanks for putting eyes on this 💪 definitely agree a tl;dr could be helpful here. One thing we should consider before re-architecting the information here is that this page is generally aimed at non-technical beginners who might not know what proof-of-stake is. The trade-off of structuring it in this way is that the article lacks the initial punch that Carl's had. In the interest of getting this out today and live (we've been sitting on it far too long) I'm going to merge this as is. I've created a card here to track your feedback and we'll try to iterate towards a happy medium here ❤️ |
Hello,
hope it is OK that I had a bash at this.
Description
This PR includes a draft page on ethereum energy consumption for review and refinement as per Issue 3020. I pulled info from the NFT page as suggested in the notes there as well as the blog by Carl Beek as suggested in the issue conversation thread.
Thanks!
Related Issue
#3020 #3072