BTC energy consumption sustainability & PPC energy efficiency breakeven point

General
1

Hi guys,

first of all congratulations to all the community for the notable steps forward being made in all fields.

I am asking to myself how much sustainabile could be bitcoin when at today we have:

'Electricity Consumption * 51,508.07 megawatt hours
Electricity Cost $7,726,210.02

All statistics are for the previous 24 hour period unless otherwise stated

  • Electricity consumption is estimated based on power consumption of 650 Watts per gigahash and electricity price of 15 cent per kilowatt hour. In reality some miners will be more or less efficient.

http://blockchain.info/stats’

And a btc market capitalization of about 4 millions $. http://coinmarketcap.com/

Do I understad well or this means that in theory, mantaining the same level of today, we are consuming every year around th 1/2 of the total capitalization of the btc market in enery costs to mantain the blockchain? This could be sustainable only with a costant exponencial rate price growth.

If this is true, when do you think Peercoin wil be at the point that POW and POS electricity consume will really be an “adoption plus” compared to btc, with the same level of security? I mean, maybe we could say it already now or we need some more criteria to correctly affirm this?

If I understood well we could already say that, in theory we could consider PPC more secure of btc even now thanks to checkpoint (that is supposed to be superated in the future) and, thanks to the mix of POW and POS, in the future this should be true even with a lower hashrate than btc.

I could imagine that at this ipothetical breakeven point there will be less increasing hashrate in BTC (just Moore’s law) and a massive adoption of a “POS based” coin.

Just wanted to share these thoughts with you all and maybe disclose some more points of view about this.

Saludos a todos!

2

I think a simple way to compare would be how many bitcoins worth of currency is secured by 1 GH. For bitcoin thats easy you take the current supply and you divide it by how many GH the network is doing

Market Value:
Bitcoin 11,963,300 BTC
Peercoin 335,288 BTC (coinmarketcap)

Hash Rate:
Bitcoin: 4.15Q (http://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/hashrate-btc-ppc.html)
PPcoin: 9.13T

Value secured by a Giga Hash
Bitcoin: 11,963,300 / 4150000 = 2.88272289157 bitcoins secured per GH
Peercoin: 335,288 / 9130 = 36.7237677985 bitcoins worth of Peercoins secured per GH

Assuming that it costs the same per GH for both you can say Peercoin is already an order of magnitude more energy efficient. But you still need to weight this by how secure PoS is compared to PoW.
You could make a reasonable assumption about how much Peercoin’s price would go down if it failed and claim that a PoS attacker would lose that percentage of the value of their stake if they used their stake to attack. I believe this makes Peercoin more secure but I don’t have the data or a simple model to back that up.

3

Since BTC asic miners are workable on PPC and BTC, PPC is vulnerable to 51% attack with around 2% of total hashrate(9T/(9T+4150T).

4

Is that true though if the attacker doesn’t have any stake to create PoS blocks? Wouldn’t they stilll have to allow PoS blocks through in order to be the longest chain? Wouldn’t it cost an order of magnitude more for them to attack than for us to defend considering the much lower difficulty of PoS vs PoW. If the attacker had a lot of stake then wouldn’t they be attacking their selves?

5

Is that true though if the attacker doesn’t have any stake to create PoS blocks? Wouldn’t they stilll have to allow PoS blocks through in order to be the longest chain? Wouldn’t it cost an order of magnitude more for them to attack than for us to defend considering the much lower difficulty of PoS vs PoW. If the attacker had a lot of stake then wouldn’t they be attacking their selves?[/quote]

Right. The rate of POS blocks is 3 times more than POW PPCoin Stats .

But the nuclear deterrence PPC (and XPM) has is the check point. If there is a successful attack, the community will choose to roll back the bad transactions.

6

Is that true though if the attacker doesn’t have any stake to create PoS blocks? Wouldn’t they stilll have to allow PoS blocks through in order to be the longest chain? Wouldn’t it cost an order of magnitude more for them to attack than for us to defend considering the much lower difficulty of PoS vs PoW. If the attacker had a lot of stake then wouldn’t they be attacking their selves?[/quote]
Yeah. You need coins as well as hash-rate. PPCoin is not as susceptible to this attack.
Gaining over 51% of the hashrate has happened in the past and is no problem.

Peercoin can not really be affected by this because of its POS. In order to make this happen we would need to ensure that we control PoW & PoS. On the PoW side we need to control 51% of the hashing rate (easy to do now) but on the PoS side we would have to ensure that we can continue to submit stakes that have coin age higher that anyone else on the network. In PPCoin, the block chain with the greatest total coin-age is chosen by the network, preventing the possibility of a 51% attack. That is the whole point and is also what makes it energy efficient. Cost to secure the network is minimal. Proof-of-work is basically only good for bringing in new coins into the system initially.

And like Sunny has said,
“Controlling 51% of hashing power in ppcoin network does not get you direct control of block chain, as I explain in the recent weekly update. You need to control proof-of-stake in order to control block chain. Of course if you have that kind of hashing power you probably can accumulate quite a sum of coins but it still require some patience.
Currently block chain is further protected via checkpointing on top of proof-of-stake.”

“As to the mining market of PPC, D7 now controls the majority of the network hash rate. However unlike pure proof-of-work cryptocurrencies, security is not threatened with 51% attack when a single pool controls a majority of mining power in the PPC network. Also, when the pool runs into technical issues, the network still mainly relies on proof-of-stake blocks so the impact to transaction processing is minimized.”

[quote=“JonnyLatte, post:2, topic:674”]Value secured by a Giga Hash
Bitcoin: 11,963,300 / 4150000 = 2.88272289157 bitcoins secured per GH
Peercoin: 335,288 / 9130 = 36.7237677985 bitcoins worth of Peercoins secured per GH

Assuming that it costs the same per GH for both you can say Peercoin is already an order of magnitude more energy efficient.[/quote]

Nice work, but I believe your math is off.

As of November 12, 2013
Market Cap: (Bitinfocharts)
Bitcoin 11,984,125 BTC
Peercoin 37,439 BTC

Hash Rate:
Bitcoin 5.1Q
Peercoin 12.25T

Value secured by a Giga Hash
Bitcoin: 11,984,125 / 5,100,000 = 2.35 bitcoins secured per GH
Peercoin: 37,439 / 12,250 = 3.06 bitcoins worth of Peercoins secured per GH

Calculation:
(3.06 - 2.35) / 2.35 = .302 (or 30.2%)

Conclusion:
Peercoin is currently 30.2% more energy efficient than Bitcoin.

7

Tanks for the correction. I must have copied litecoin’s market-cap.