Ethereum is switching off its mining in favor of another consensus system called "proof-of-stake." Basically the mining hardware and electricity are replaced by the currency itself. There's a consensus protocol that works if people don't cheat in certain ways, it's provable if someone cheats, and the "miners" lock some ETH into the system as a security bond. If someone submits a proof that you cheated then you lose your bond. Energy consumption will drop by an estimated 99.95%.
Most web3 stuff runs on Ethereum, which is the second-biggest energy consumer in crypto. Bitcoin is the biggest and has no plans to move to proof-of-stake, but isn't really involved in web3.
Ethereum's proof-of-stake protocol has been running in parallel for a year with billions of dollars in real ETH deposited, and for the merged system there's a multi-client testnet running.
It's been delayed before, but hopefully it happens this time. I don't own any, but it would be nice for GPU prices to normalize and the environmental cost would go down substantially.
politelemon|4 years ago
DennisP|4 years ago
Most web3 stuff runs on Ethereum, which is the second-biggest energy consumer in crypto. Bitcoin is the biggest and has no plans to move to proof-of-stake, but isn't really involved in web3.
Ethereum's proof-of-stake protocol has been running in parallel for a year with billions of dollars in real ETH deposited, and for the merged system there's a multi-client testnet running.
paulgb|4 years ago
It's been delayed before, but hopefully it happens this time. I don't own any, but it would be nice for GPU prices to normalize and the environmental cost would go down substantially.
kristofferR|4 years ago
When we're talking about web3, we're generally talking about Ethereum: https://web3js.readthedocs.io
pavel_lishin|4 years ago
serverholic|4 years ago