Alex de Vries just published a commentary in Joule on Bitcoin’s growing energy problem.
De Vries estimates that globally, computers mining Bitcoins crunch 26 quintillion hashes (that's 26 followed by 18 zeros: 26,000,000,000,000,000,000,) every second of every day. Bitcoin miners use at least 2.55 Gigawatts of power, and is predicted to use three times that by the end of this year. That's more than some countries (eg. Ireland, Austria, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands) use in a year.
The Estimated Number of Terahashes per Second (Trillions of Hashes per Second) Performed by the Bitcoin Network
Source: Blockchain.info.
Instead of wasting energy on useless hashes, Gridcoin rewards “miners” for using their computer power to help with scientific research on the BOINC platform. To get started with Gridcoin see the links below.
Some of the BOINC projects have led to scientific publications in prestigious journals like Cell, Science and Nature.
Join Gridcoin Research and BOINC and Change the World
BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, pronounced /bɔɪŋk/ – rhymes with "oink") is a distributed work platform that has been around since 2002 and rewards all participants with credits. BOINC consists of over 500,000+ active users and many more computers. BOINC holds the Guinness world record as the largest computing grid in the world. It is a popular platform for researchers to do large amounts of distributed work. The infrastructure is already in place, and no payment is required. Doing distributed work is purely voluntary, where users can attach any project of their choosing.

Gridcoin Research is a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) cryptocurrency that rewards Proof-of-Research (PoR) for BOINC computation.
Gridcoin is an amazing project with an amazing community!
Website: https://gridcoin.us
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GridcoinNetwork
Discord: https://discord.me/gridcoin
Steemit: https://steemit.com/created/gridcoin
White Paper: https://gridcoin.us/assets/img/whitepaper.pdf
-- Github --
Codebase: https://github.com/gridcoin/Gridcoin-Research
Community: https://github.com/gridcoin-community
Many of the guides on the internet are compiled at one site and this can be helpful for new people:
https://www.whatisgridcoin.com/
You got a 19.38% Upvote and Resteem from @ebargains, as well as upvotes from our curation trail followers!
If you are looking to earn a passive no hassle return on your Steem Power, delegate your SP to @ebargains by clicking on one of the ready to delegate links:
50SP | 100SP | 250SP | 500SP | 1000SP | 5000SP | Custom Amount
You will earn 80% of the voting service's earnings based on your delegated SP's prorated share of the service's SP pool daily! That is up to 38.5% APR! You can also undelegate at anytime.
We are also a very profitable curation trail leader on https://steemauto.com/. Follow @ebargains today and earn more on curation rewards!
As fans of the movie Back to the Future know all too well,
that's twice as much as the Flux Capacitor!
Such a dilemma: PoW provides security but at a huge ecological cost. The question is , is it worth it? Right now most likely NO, in the future, maybe Yes.
No, PoW is unsustainable.
The more important the blockchain gets, the more you need to invest to keep it running. It is a constant, maybe even increasing overhead.
And that is not new, Satoshi Nakamoto already at the start conceded that in the future Bitcoin has to change to more sustainable methods. Which is (technically) possible, but the miner's interest is too strong.
There have been some interesting proposals like fruitchain, a chain that is fair and prevent mining pools. The beauty of PoW, compared to POS and other consensus, is that it is pretty easy to constraint the security to some energy cost.
Too bad useful PoW is not widely spread.
I dont see its security as being all that good really, it inevitably leads to pools, who are operated by just a few very wealthy entities, who could easily collude at any time.
some proposals (like fruitchain) prevent mining pools. Still it doesn't solve everything.
It would be awesome if useful PoW was the default.
I couldnt find much easily available info on fruitchain, I wonder if it could work for PoS too; a few staking pools are popping up now and its bad news in my view.
fruitchain is a research paper so there is not much presentations: https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/916. Maybe there are more research like that but I haven't seen much yet.
Now I am wondering, do we want to make pools better or do we want to totally avoid them?? I don't have a definitive idea at this point.
Delegated Proof of Stake, as Steem has, is much better implementation.
Bitcoin and PoW is an unnecessary and overly used system that only results in huge amounts of power consumption to no end.
My main issue with DPOS is that it somehow push witness to be only companies, like PoW mining pools. At least there are more witness (TOP 20 vs 7 mining pools on ETH and BTC).
There's no rule that it's 20 witnesses, it can be 30 or 100. It's all about the chain preferences. Bitshares has ~27 at the moment and changes up and down from time to time.
I guess until it happens once on steem we won't know.
Bitcoin has become an increasingly expensive proof-of-concept. Proving that blockchain can be implemented is going to have plenty of practical uses, probably not as revolutionary as its proponents claim.
One possible future for Bitcoin is that other cryptos will prove to have more utility (faster transaction times, better security, lower energy consumption), thereby usurping Bitcoin. Protocols like PoS, Proof of Time and Proof of Space may be its undoing.
But it is, unfortunately, much simpler to reason on PoW security than PoS and other consensus.
Your Post Has Been Featured on @Resteemable!
Feature any Steemit post using resteemit.com!
How It Works:
1. Take Any Steemit URL
2. Erase
https://3. Type
reGet Featured Instantly & Featured Posts are voted every 2.4hrs
Join the Curation Team Here | Vote Resteemable for Witness