Relevant read: Ethereum Energy Consumption Index - Digiconomist
Can you address the elephant in the room? and be transparent to everyone? Maybe with a dedicated section in the main website…
And yes, I know that eth2 is going to change that but its not coming soon enough…
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Which blockchains have similar features/compatibility that are efficient?
The following opinion is my own:
No one neglects the environmental impact of PoW secured chains. In a perfect world we’d have all attributes we desire combined (security, liveness, fast finality, scalability, liquidity, composability etc.). Today however, that isn’t the case. There are certain tradeoffs you need to make for these decisions. I believe it isn’t Radicles core concern to solve the layer 1 energy consumption of high OPEX PoW chains.
I personally doubt that there is any other layer 1 besides Bitcoin and Ethereum that checks the security criteria required. Lets skip the Bitcoin layer 1 as it wouldn’t be feasible, what are you left with? You don’t want to launch such undertaking on an untested but potentially environmental friendly PoS chain. PoS for sybil resistance is something everyone is excited about but lets observe it live in open environments for longer. Additionally imo Ethereum provides the best interoperability and liquidity to date, which is something I personally would appreciate.
You can’t solve all problems at once. In a world where is so much energy wasted, I’m willing to spend a portion of that to support the sustainability of one the most important public goods in our world: open source code.
There are many other practical reasons regarding fungibility of electricity and a potential positive impact on the progress of adopting renewable energies that I won’t get into. As you’ve pointed out ETH 2.0 is attempting to move away from PoW already.
Again, this is my personal opinion and the Radicle team members might disagree here.
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