Researchers from the Universities of Colombia and Paris Sud suggest that photonic chips can make Mining Bitcoin is at least 10 times more energy efficient.
It seems that every time someone uses the terms “bitcoin” and “power consumption” in one sentence, there is a disagreement between those who say that the network has a huge impact on the environment and those who say that these fears are overestimated .
What is not negotiable is the fact that miners can earn much more in places with lower energy costs. A white paper published two weeks ago by Columbia and Paris-Sud researchers claims that a Proof-of-work modification to encourage the use of photon chips in mining equipment can reduce energy consumption to less than one tenth of its current level.
Michael Dubrovsky is a co-author Optical Proof of Work with Marshall Ball, a doctoral student in computer science at Columbia University, and Bogdan Penkovsky, a doctoral student at the University of Paris-Court. Dubrovsky is a co-founder of PoWx, which develops hardware and software to change the struggle for control over work.
Dubrovsky told us: “We believe that there is a large unmet demand for mining in large cities around the world, where many people would like to use one or more cars at home. Currently, without access to cheap electricity, this is not possible. ”
Instead, most of mining The world is carried out in Eurasian countries. Chinese mining companies control most of the hash power Bitcoin, and some fear that China might stifle technology and destroy the network. In Europe, Russia sends cheap energy to separatist states within Moldova and Ukraine to ensure crypto mining and at the same time reorient the geopolitical order.
Switching from proof-of-work (PoW) networks toproof-of-stake"(PoS) solves the problem of power consumption, because computers will no longer need to guess the answers to the hash as quickly as possible. But pos presents his problems. On the one hand, the requirement that people have a certain amount can push the network towards centralization. That is why Dubrovsky and his co-authors instead study photonic integrated circuits that can be used to significantly reduce energy costs in mining.
The bottom line is this: To keep the PoW network secure, miners must incur some economic costs, but it should not be due to electricity bills. By using a new algorithm – optical proof of work (oPoW) – the blockchain system can instead impose economic costs in the form of capital equipment costs (CAPEX) and reduce energy consumption. As Dubrovksy stated, "there is no reason to install a US$0,04/kWh electricity mine in Mongolia if energy is 5% of your total budget."
Optical proof of work would change the PoW algorithm to work better with silicon photon chips, which led to the creation of a new type of miner. The authors say this is different from “previous attempts to change PoW algorithms to support a particular hardware paradigm,” such as ProgPoW, because it is not related to ASIC resistance. Instead, photonic chips can turn ASICs into super-ASICs with lower running costs.
A recent article in MIT Technology Review titled “Can photonic chips save Bitcoin?” there were a few doubts with the paper. Firstly, it is theoretically true that photonic chips are more efficient, but this has yet to be conclusively proven.
This is somewhat true, Dubrovsky admitted. But the researchers are hopeful, in part because "there are many groups working to commercialize them for computing, from startups to Intel." Dubrovsky told Decrypt: “It remains to be seen in which cases they can outperform electronics. OPoW is a great sandbox application because we designed the algorithm specifically for the strengths and weaknesses of the technology.”
Secondly, the authors did not predict actual energy savings. To do this, Dubrovsky said, people will have to wait for the publication of the “upcoming conference”, which they publish, which presents a “more detailed model”. Researchers, however, said they expected "a mature oPoW network will spend 10-100 times less energy."
Finally, they didn't show how the algorithm would change the existing power cost difference, which would still be important because hardware costs would be roughly the same for everyone, but electricity costs would not.
Dubrovsky told Decrypt that while differences in the cost of energy will remain, their impact can be minimized: operational risk becomes very important. Countries with the rule of law, stability and low interest rates will attract big miners.”