Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency
As a Bitcoin miner (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;toom.im" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;toom.im</a>), while I appreciate the work put into it, this particular metric of &quot;transactions per kW&quot; might not work the way you expect.<p>The main point that you should understand is that a PoW blockchain&#x27;s energy usage <i>is not</i> proportional to its transactions.<p>I&#x27;ll say that a different way: the transactions themselves do not use any energy in mining.<p>I&#x27;ll say this in a third way: it takes exactly the same amount of energy to mine an empty block as it does a 1GB block of transactions, as it does a 1,000,000,000 PB block.<p>In reality, transactions are all hashed together in a mining pool into a single numeric hash before miners ever see them.  It doesn&#x27;t matter how many transactions are included in the hash.  The hashpower just has to find a magic number matching that hash.<p>On the other hand, the #1 factor that increases a blockchain&#x27;s energy usage is its price per coin.  The price of a coin is how much that coin is worth to be mined, which is the incentive for miners to dump energy into mining it.  In steady state, miners will dump energy into mining a coin until the cost of energy = the value of the coins coming out.<p>This is why you can see Bitcoin SV at the top of the list -- it&#x27;s worth the least of the Bitcoins.<p>And it&#x27;s also misleading to compute the second factor -- transactions per second -- by counting the actual transactions on the blockchain, rather than looking at the transaction capacity.  Because blockchains only cost something per transaction once they reach capacity.  This is misleading with Bitcoin SV, for instance, because that coin artificially creates bogus transactions on its blockchain in order to make it look popular and demonstrate the vision of large blockchains.  Bitcoin Cash, on the other hand, can handle a thousands of transactions per second (on testnet) but doesn&#x27;t clog its live blockchain with them.<p>So, in sum, if you send a transaction on Bitcoin Cash, it will cost 0 kW of electricity, even though it says 31.3 Txs&#x2F;MWh (which equates to 31.9kW&#x2F;Tx) in this chart.  This is because transactions do not cost anything in electricity.  Electricity only goes to preventing double-spends.  A better metric would be &quot;energy use per double-spend that was prevented.&quot;