Elon Musk Wants Energy Efficient Cryptocurrency

Elon Musk indicates that Tesla will stop using Bitcoin for transactions. Tesla wants to use cryptocurrencies that are at least 100 times energy-efficient per transaction.

There is speculation that Tesla could enable solar-powered cryptocurrency mining, support other cryptocurrencies like Doge and could create their own cryptocurrency.

Leafscore lists the most sustainable cryptocurrencies for 2021.

Digiconomist estimates that compared to 1100 kWh for each Bitcoin transaction, Nano uses just 0.112 Wh. Etherium uses about 85 kWh per transaction.

Cardano uses a โ€˜Proof of Stakeโ€™ consensus mechanism where those participating in the currency buy tokens to join the network. Cardano claiming that the cryptocurrency network consumes only 6 GWh of power. Bitcoin consumes 115 TWh of power per year.

SOURCES- Elon Musk, Tesla, Leafscore, Digiconomist
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com (Brian owns shares of Tesla)

45 thoughts on “Elon Musk Wants Energy Efficient Cryptocurrency”

  1. Webdollar cryptocurrency is already 100% green.
    100 % Proof of Stake, soon DPOS (Delegated Proof of Stake).

  2. Great angle.

    Step 2. Clouds (starting with compute) in the sky. Instead of moving power to earth, move consumption to space.

    I have always thought power beaming to be stupid inefficient. Just put PV cells in the same space as the planned receivers. Storage still needs to be solved

  3. Additionally, I question where the 39.26kgCO2 comes from. Did Ethereum provide that number to Digiconomist, or is Digiconomist just taking some global kgCO2-per-kWh average and multiplying it? Because I know there are crypto mining organizations that use solar power and other renewables, so the current kgCO2-per-kWh for crypto generation might not necessarily match the global kgCO2-per-kWh average.

  4. ETH energy consumption is expected to drop by at least 99% once they finish switching to Proof-of-Stake. based off the numbers listed here, that would put it at 827 Wh per transaction, which would be the same order-of-magnitude as what Cardano is claiming, assuming Cardano's 6GWh-annual-estimate is based off recent transaction rates instead of 2020's rates (Cardano does 35k-40k transactions per day now, so 411-470 Wh per transaction). If it was based on 2020 rates, that would probably put Cardano at 1600-3300 Wh per transaction. ETH currently does about 1.5 million transactions per day.

  5. Uses don't care. They just want the cheapest. For now, everyone is an investor. When/if the real users come, they'll demand efficient and lower fee i.e. the crypto with the least costs will win. Ironically, crypto will have to be centralized to lower costs!

  6. No one wants to be the greatest fool. So, all will be sleeping with their phones. But like last time, most will miss the peak again.

  7. No one talks about the elephant in the room. How can all be rich at the same time with coin! Because all tech aside, everyone is buying to become rich. Very few are buying for actual use!

  8. So in the end, the systems must converge to more efficient centralized computing i.e. back to square one. There was no need for decentralization in the first place. The entire economy cannot convert to decentralized system just to make a political point.

  9. NO!
    Wrong!!!
    PoW is needed to make costly to rewrite the blockchain and allow nodes to select the authoritative chain.

  10. The problem is BTC (and the rest) are not developed to SCALE unbounded).
    Bitcoin can scale. But BTC is not more Bitcoin. BSV is Bitcoin.

    We can do 1 GB blocks, 1K more than BTC and we are working to do more.
    Fee are 250K times cheaper than BTC (way lower than 1 cent).
    And fraud proof.

  11. Yes.
    The banking system managing just the payments is way more insecure and costly.
    But Elon is right BTC don't scale, and 50$ fee are a show stopper.
    Actually everything over 1 cent is stealing.

  12. PoW is used to secure the chain of transactions.
    Of course Bitcoin is a chain of valid transactions (this is BSV or BitcoinSV) and not a chain of valid blocks (like BTC).
    The way to lower the cost of energy per transactions is increasing the number of transactions in a block.
    BSV can already do 1 GB block sustained. 1 thousands more than BTC. Much more before the end of this year. This is 1/1000th less energy per transaction with BSV TODAY, NOW.
    We can use the blockchain to publish every type of data, not just transaction data.
    And fee are $ 0.0001 per transaction (and the plan is to go down further).

    E.G.
    You buy an dishwasher, you pay the seller, the transaction can include the warranty card, the contract, the user manual, all timestamped. And if there is any need of fix the appliance, the support can refer to the transaction and the payment for the support can refer to the problem fixed. A public database about the problem of the dishwashers you are considering to buy. And all refer to actual payments.

    Multiply this to everything.

    And it can be all made in the respect of individual privacy.

  13. I'm sure Elon has some solar panels and a battery or two that he will sell you to make your miner less impactful on the environment. I wonder how concerned he was about the environmental impact of developing and producing the products that he sells?

  14. "Centralized systems are 10000x cheaper" until the central authority uses it's power over the system to pay for starting wars.

  15. There are stake networks with smart incentives protocols like cardano. STAKING on Ada cardano network give you 4~6% percent return a year, but only if you put your stake in a small pool. This is an incentive to create a more decentralized network. If you try to centralize your stake you wonโ€™t have the fixed payment incentive and can even get a burned disincentive.

  16. Musk is not whale enough to evidence the battle royale that I witnessed. That was a pod of whales, pushing the price down. I saw that candle jumping up and down $10k at an instant several times when they were pushing down past 48,000.
    That was not from Elon's remark.
    He may have given the signal, but the real manipulators were the usual suspects.
    They liquidated most of the long positions. Get ready for a new ATH, I am betting.
    I moved it all to Cardano and grabbed a quick 15%, but it's all back in Bitcoin now.
    Gonna have to sleep with my phone next to me just in case this is a false bottom.
    It will go back up, eventually.
    It's a game to these folks.

  17. That's the basis for Bitcoin and other proof-of-work coins.

    There's also proof-of-stake which is based on entirely different principles. Basic idea: you stake the currency itself, you have a protocol that reaches consensus if everybody follows the rules, and if someone breaks the rules you destroy their stake.

  18. With proof of stake you don't need to consume more energy than any other internet protocol. With smart contracts you can build all sorts of applications on top.

  19. They can sell space based solar powered mining rigs when they get starship cargo traffic going. It will probably be very hard for coal powered computing to compete. Maybe this will be the first big golden application for space based solar power. Beaming not needed, which makes things much easier.

  20. Then why not get rid of fiat currency instead. Why this special rule for cryptocurrency and not government fiat?!?

  21. Isn't the "absolute scarcity" of the computationally hard to find numbers the root of value of the whole scheme?

    And hard to find = energy intensive. I doubt there are truly energy efficient crypto coins, or they would pose no challenge to find at all, and therefore, have not even a sentimental value.

    But hey, I'm just a dilettante on the Internet. Keep on calculating.

  22. Yep, I had my doubts, but now I'm certain cryptocoins are the worst idea in economics since the invention of economics, well, that and Marxism.

    It consumes energy, it produces nothing but computationally hard to find strings of numbers.

    We can't eat them, we can't do anything with them but "posses" a computationally hard to find token. And you know what: it's an algorithm! you can make infinite variations of bitcoins with slightly different algorithms, make your own and become the king of the hill. It's the interest of the many where the value of this lies (Tulip mania, rings a bell?).

    Besides we could literally dump our whole civilization to the trash calculating them.

    It's a memetic virus that exploits our greatest weakness: self interest and greed.

  23. People talk about bitcoin as if the rich didn't get richer there, but those big mining rigs cost a lot of money. The more money you have to invest, the more hashes you can generate, plus there are economies of scale.

    Proof-of-stake does not have economies of scale. Everybody earns the same return on investment. This is better than legacy banking too, where you get a better interest rate if you have more deposited.

    Stakers do have lower costs than miners, but coin issuance made lower to compensate, so the lower costs benefit all holders instead of just the stakers.

    In terms of the number of nodes, most proof-of-stake chains have a limited number of full validators, but on Ethereum they're pretty much unlimited. There are well over 100K validators so far.

  24. Yes, it will go down by at least 99.9%. It'll have the energy usage of any other internet protocol with a similar number of users.

  25. If Bitcoin fails, so does every other crypto (which is what will eventually happen). Centralized systems are 10000x cheaper. So how many people will go with an inefficient system for simple political reasons?

  26. Proof of stake results in centralization. So what's the point of starting with decentralized in the first place?

  27. No, Proof of Stake and other consensus algorithms also have the property that they do not need for a central trust body while still preventing double-spending. Proof of Work was simply the first algorithm devised with such properties.

  28. i watched the other day on netflix a movie on blockchain … all the positives and intended benefits (cheap, instant, efficient trn) turned actually against it ๐Ÿ™ still big fan of blockchain, but certainly not of how bitcoin ended up. wondering if upgrade is possible

  29. It's probably less the energy consumption, than the extreme latency in the transaction relative to volatility. You don't want to sell somebody a car for $50K in Bitcoin, only to have the price of Bitcoin have shifted to the point where you only get $40K when the transaction finally posts. You want the payment to go through fast enough that the value of the currency hasn't significantly shifted.

  30. OK, that was really stupid, because you'd want to know the energy consumed per transaction, not by the whole system.ย 

    It's like, somebody askes which gets better mileage, a Volvo or a Lamborghini Countach? And you answer that Volvos consume ten thousand times as much gasoline.

    Well, duh, because there are a lot more Volvos on the road!

  31. I'm pretty sure "proof of work" was chosen to prevent rampant inflation without the necessity of bitcoin being a fiat currency. So, isn't he talking about switching to a digital fiat currency, which is pretty much exactly what was trying to be avoided?

  32. Is Bitcoin going to go the way of Adobe Flash after Jobs publicized boycott at the time? Rightly so this time.

  33. Yepa!
    If the Afghanistani and the North Vietnamese can defeat the "almighty" USA, why not Iran?
    Go brave Iranian lions!

  34. USA is thrown out of Afghanistan. Defeated by the donkey riding tribes from the middle ages!

  35. I wonder what the "decentralized" thing mean it that case? The entire point of using this inefficient system was making it decentralized. Proof of stake will result in centralization.

  36. Will Etherium's carbon footprint go down when (if it is able without imploding) it switches from proof of work to proof of stake?

  37. Hmmm?
    People who can afford to buy a Tesla, or who have plenty of Bitcoins don't want the world to know how many Bitcoins they have, or know they bought a Tesla, which is the case when using Bitcoins. I'm sure many of Elon's customers have complained to Tesla for not accepting any privacy currencies, like Monero or Pirate Chain. I think because Pirate Chain uses much, much less electricity than Monero, and also has much better privacy, its an excellent bet Elon picks Pirate Chain. Pirate Chain has been gaining popularity because with Pirate Chain no one can find out who has money, or how much, or what they've been spending it on. Monero is fair and provides "reasonable" privacy, but its not eco friendly enough for Tesla's needs. I'm guessing Elon/Tesla picks Pirate Chain for sales transactions. Its got the privacy his customers want, and the low electrical impact for ecology and global warmists.

  38. Kind of a false comparison. If you want to reduce energy usage with crypto, why choose the the least efficient crypto?

  39. In any case, Satoshi himself said that Bitcoin was supposed to be a proof-of-concept; it should be inevitable that other cryptocurrencies with better properties will eventually supplant it.

  40. Did anyone calculate the energy cost of using equivalent fiat currency and compare it to Bitcoin?

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