The Merge and crypto's electricity consumption

How much energy use did Ethereum's transition to proof-of-stake really reduce

TLDR;

• The Merge likely decreased global electricity consumption by 0.03-0.06% rather than the 0.2% estimates circulated by members of the Ethereum Foundation.

• The Cambridge Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index must be adjusted for rising global energy prices and is currently overestimating the stable electricity consumption of the network by about 15%.

  • This analysis has been open-sourced and is available here.

• GPUs that migrated from Ethereum to other GPU-mined chains have decimated the profitability of mining those cryptoassets and will likely only mine in the short-term.

Estimated reading time: about 30 minutes.

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