Energy consumption of any man-made system has to be sustainable especially in the 21st century. Due to the constant increase in CO2 emissions, the man-made systems need to be energy-efficient.
Most people when they think of blockchain technology, they think of it as the most recent and innovative man-made system. The distributed ledger technology or blockchain as we call it is exponentially growing in its use and many applications are being built. Hence its energy consumption has to be taken into account.
Blockchains like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and many more consume a lot of energy. The high energy consumption is due to the high security provided by the network, but at what cost? For example, the energy consumption of the Bitcoin network is more than the energy consumption of Switzerland.
The energy consumption of a blockchain network depends on
- the consensus protocol used
- number of applications built
- number of users
- frequency of usage
Bitcoin is the first peer-to-peer exchange built on blockchain technology. Its consensus protocol is HashRate based Proof of Work. Current estimates suggest that the total energy expenditure of Bitcoin has surpassed the energy consumption of nations like Switzerland and the Czech Republic.
To know the exact figures, one transaction in Bitcoin network consumes
- 420 Kilowatt-hours: This is equal to powering an average American home for two weeks.
- equal to burning 360 tons of sugar.
The energy consumption of the HashRate based Proof of Work (i.e. Bitcoin) is a barrier for its widespread adoption.
Other solutions or consensus protocols (in the fig above) have emerged such as Proof-of-Stake, DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph), and many more. But these consensuses pose an obvious problem, for example the Proof-of-Stake poses the problem of centralization and governance while DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) poses the problem of data availability.
Uniris network stands out due to its focus on data availability and on the global and decentralized spirit of proof-of-work (not the HashRate PoW).
Energy Consumption of Uniris Network
- 3.6 Billion times less energy then Bitcoin
- 308 million times less energy than Ethereum
- 60000 times less energy than EOS
- 0.42 Wsec per transaction
- Equivalent to burn one tenth of a gram of sugar.
The theoretical calculation below gives the best results:
a. Daily Consumption of a Uniris node working at 100%: 15Wh (e.g. Intel NUC i3)
- Ten nodes are needed for 10 seconds to validate and replicate a transaction (however, the current figures for validation of a transaction are less than 1 second for a single node and around 100 ms for the replication).
- The number of transactions on the Bitcoin network is 93 million transactions per year with an energy consumption of around 38.7 TWh/year.
b. The number of transactions validated by 10 nodes per year in Uniris network:
- 365.4 × 24 × 60 × 6 = 3,157,046 transactions (becoz 10 nodes are dedicated for 10 sec to validate a transaction)
c. The number of nodes required to handle the current yearly Bitcoin transactions:
- 93,000,000 ÷ 3,157,046 = 29.45 sets of 10 nodes
29.45 × 10 = 295 nodes
Only 295 nodes are required by Uniris network to cover the current performance of the Bitcoin network.
d. The energy consumption of Uniris network wrt Bitcoin network,
295 × (365.4 × 24) × 15 = 38,805 kWh/year
This means to do the same work Bitcoin consumes 38.7 TWh/year whereas Uniris consumes just 38.8 MWh/year
This low energy consumption is further complimented with the highest security.
Uniris is not only a pioneer in low energy consumption, but also in
Scalability => Capability to handle UNLIMITED transactions per second
Traceability => Zero knowledge proof
Decentralized => Randomness ensures complete decentralization
Sustainable and Green Solution => Energy consumption is 3.6 billion times less energy consumption than Bitcoin
Physical and Cyber Access Management => Uniris blockchain is coupled with 'Public Biometric Identification' (Patented)
DApps Compatibility => Market Place, Identity Management, etc.