Hear me out. On Reddit, the #solarpunk channel is decidedly anti-blockchain. To me, this is totally surprising and against the actual ethos of Solarpunk - to integrate technology for a bright, clean future.
Granted, blockchains don’t have much reputation in alternative circles. And for a good reason. A lot is just linked to scams, get-rich-quick dudes, and speculation, apart from energy consumption arguments.
But blockchain at its core is just a distributed database. One that has no central authority, can not be tampered with, cannot be altered, nor taken down if parametrized accordingly.
This allows - as a potential - to democratize access and value creation. Renewable energy is also fundamentally decentralized. Everyone can participate!
Now, with the costs of renewable energy creation (notably solar) shrunk significantly, and the demand for energy consumption rising heavily, if we only think about the booming electric vehicles alone -
What if people could earn money by generating solar energy and selling directly to vehicles, instead of the grid? I believe this could actually boost renewable energy generation over the roof.
Generators would be rewarded with a blockchain token for the energy generated, while consumers would pay for the energy in those tokens. Therefore speculation would be curbed as the tokens are for a real thing, energy, which on top is a stable unit - kWh.
Of course there are a lot of hurdles here - mostly institutional. Usually, energy is controlled by local authorities. They don’t want to allow anyone access to this market.
Then there is the distribution issue. Energy must be transported to the points of consumption, the charging stations. But due to the decentralized nature, this could actually result surprisingly cheap, as instead of transporting large distances, more charging stations in neighborhoods could reduce those distances. But still, this would require upfront charging stations and distribution investments.
I am an engineer. A dreamer. More often than not, as many many others, the realities of markets and economies clash with such ideals, thrashing generally good ideas.
But I wonder if such a scheme could made be possible. Anyone having some good suggestions? I mean mainly from the economics side. How to design the scheme, how to make it so that it is interesting to everyone? There are already several solar energy blockchains, but they kinda failed to get traction.
For the more radicals - I also dream of a money-less Solarpunk future, but to date, it seems further away than ever, looking at the right wing surge everywhere. Maybe we can build bridges at least from the technological side. Thank you if you got so far. Happy to respond to critique and questions.
I’m sorry but this is absolute nonsense.
A reasonable energy cost for a single transaction on a modern database is about 0.1J. Even factoring in redudancy and backups, if we’re incredibly generous to your argument and multiply that cost by ten, that puts us at 1J. In fact, I’ll be ludicrously generous, I’ll multiply by 100, so 10J per transaction. That’s an absolutely insane cost, but we’ll imagine that we’re doing this as inefficiently as it is humanly possible to do.
The cost per transaction of Bitcoin sits at around 1,000,000,000J per transaction. Yes, 1 billion joules per transaction. To claim that these are comparable energy costs is like me claiming to be as rich as Elon Musk. Even looking at something like Ethereum, you’re still at about 1,000 joules per transaction. Stacked up against our hilariously overestimated energy costs for our traditional database, you’re still 100 times over.
(Source: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x)
Also, you can’t just blindly ascribe the energy cost of “everything else in the same datacentre” to a standard database driven solution and act as if that’s a reasonable comparison. That would be like me adding the total energy cost of every single building where a validator node for your blockchain is running, even if it’s just someone’s laptop sitting in the corner of a forty story office.
Look, I came into this thread to seriously engage your question, but I cannot let an obvious falsehood like this slide by unchallenged. It is such a gross distortion of the truth that I’m actually struggling to decide if you really believe this, or if you’re straight up trolling.
The obvious falsehood is dismissing each blockchain by using bitcoin as a reference. I am NOT talking about bitcoin-style Proof-Of-Work transactions whatsoever. Also, the article you mention is from 2020, where Ethereum was also running Proof-Of-Work, like bitcoin. It doesn’t anymore. I don’t dispute that bitcoin uses incomparable amounts of energy. If you can’t see what I am talking about then thanks for engaging but let’s not converse any longer.
I addressed all of this in this other reply: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/15924074
Basically, handwaving at “Ethereum is proof of stake now” just isn’t good enough. The difference in scale of power consumption between public ledger blockchains and traditional databases are so vast that even the most optimistic models for reducing their inefficiencies still only get you to “pretty bad” at best.
Your answer isn’t good enough either. Aren’t you forgetting application servers, web servers, load balancers, Cloudflare, firewalls and all that stuff which allow a database to just use 0.1J? Because if we are talking VISA and banking scale of transactions that’s what it takes.
Besides, it’s just missing the point. Traditional databases are good and best at what they do - address traditional problems. Blockchains address different problems, so comparing them for completely different use cases won’t work. You can compare MySQL vs Oracle vs PostgreSQL that way.
I’m not “forgetting” those things, because they’re simply not relevant to what’s being discussed. A web server doesn’t “allow” a traditional database to use any more or less power. A web server is a web server. A firewall is a firewall. They’re not in any meaningful way connected to the transaction layer that we’re discussing. Blockchain validator nodes also sit behind firewalls, if the people running them know what they’re doing.
Again, this is just a handwave.
If your argument is “Public ledger blockchains can be just as efficient as traditional databases”, which is the argument you previously presented, you need to actually demonstrate that.
If your argument is “It doesn’t matter if public ledger blockchains are less efficient, that inefficiency is worth it for the unique benefits they provide” then, first off, why did you make the other argument originally, and second, what have you done to actually show that only a public ledger blockchain can solve the problem you’re describing?
That was never my argument. If you read carefully, there were other arguments I made in context. I just wanted to put it into perspective. Everything uses energy, and comparing things in tech is often very complex because it depends on a zillion factors.
In a blockchain, to make a transaction you need the node and that’s it. In traditional client server model, a database on its own rarely does the job, especially if you talk transactions and banking. Hence why web servers and all the other layers very well account and are relevant to store a transaction, otherwise it just doesn’t happen. I know because I have done this for a living.
What have you done to show it does not? You are only arguing about energy. To date I have yet to see an application where I can send money in sub-seconds to a person in Venezuela which has trouble accessing international markets and censorship by the government. Or creating a tamper-proof land registry which can’t be altered by the government or a rich guy in some developing country. Or a database which can’t be censored, or shut down by a government or some powerful dude. An application which allowed anyone to create money (even if it’s too often misused). Mind you, I am not saying blockchain is good for everything nor that it is the best thing ever invented nor that it does not have problems. Any tech does.
I am sure you will find ways to argue against this, because when someone’s mind is made up there’s little space, but I am not here to convince you, I just stand my ground and make my case. Have a nice evening.
There are literal pages upon pages here of people trying to convince you that you’re coming at this whole thing wrong. Not to mention those chiming in with their upvotes and downvotes (a misuse of that system, sure, but they’re raising their voice none-the-less). Are you really sure that you want to start throwing these particular stones from inside your glass house?
I love when anti-crypto ideologues talk about bitcoin like it’s the only option. It’s 2024. Maybe if you didn’t spend the past 15 years mindlessly hating, you might understand there are better options now.
From your own outdated article:
The most rosily optimistic estimates of proof of stake’s reduction in Ethereum’s energy costs (that I’ve seen) put it at a 2000x reduction. That means that in theory, if all of those gains were realised, and if we start with the numbers I previously cited, Ethereum might hit the same energy cost per transaction as a pretty inefficient traditional database setup.
Except that transaction rates are fixed in public ledger distributed blockchain systems (because every validator node has to have time to clock in with their results), so as the network scales up the cost per transaction also scales up. I’m actually doing Ethereum a favour by using old numbers there, because it’s final cost per transaction prior to the proof of stake switch was certainly much higher than it was at the time of that snapshot.
Traditional databases scale in a way where the economy of scale works for you rather than against you. The bigger you get, the lower your cost per transaction even as your total costs increase. Blockchains anti-scale; the cost per transaction goes up as the network gets bigger.