In the wake of Tesla’s Bitcoin acceptance brouhaha, crypto energy usage and carbon emissions have become a hot topic. In light of this, Ethereum Foundation researcher Carl Beekhuizen has published an article estimating that Ethereum might be able to lower its energy consumption by up to 99.95 percent following its transition to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus.
Beekhuizen asserts that there are about 87,890 validators on the Ethereum blockchain, excluding staking services and crypto exchanges. According to him, these validators cumulatively need roughly 1.64 megawatts of power. Even if the power requirement of these validators were to rise to 2.64 megawatts, Beekhuizen claims that this is still within an acceptable range, as this will correspond to the energy consumption of a small village as opposed to a whole country.
Currently, Ethereum miners consume roughly 9.9 terawatt-hours annually. Although his figures are just “ballpark estimations,” Beekhuizen is confident that ETH 2.0 will be 200 times more energy-efficient than its current Proof-of-Work (PoW) setup.
However, on the flip side of a more energy-efficient Ethereum is what opponents of PoS believe could be a less secure blockchain due to a higher number of attack vectors.
As reported by BTC PEERS, Bitcoin’s energy-guzzling flaw was recently brought to the limelight by Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) after the car manufacturer announced that it was no longer accepting the digital asset as payment due to environmental concerns.