"Small city" sounds suspiciously small. Last time I checked, Bitcoin had the same electricity consumption as the entire country of Austria. I can believe that Ethereum has less miners, but by that over 2 magnitudes?
Bitcoin is entirely mined by dedicated hardware that's incapable of doing anything other than mining Bitcoin. Ethereum is mostly mined by GPUs that can obviously be repurposed for other applications if need be.
If the electricity cost for Ethereum mining gets too out of control, the miners can just point their GPUs at some other task. Whereas Bitcoin miners are stuck with sunk cost of rapidly depreciating capital, and pretty much will never turn even during electricity price spikes.
It may take a bit more ram and need a decent bus as a result which is why people mine on GPUs that have both. Rather than cheap ASICS that are cheap because they have neither. "Resistant" ain't the word to use.
Bitcoin mines 12.5 BTC (exactly) per 10 minutes (approximately). Normalizing the ETH rate against the BTC, we get 2 ETH * 6 * 10 = 120 ETH.
So at current market rates, 120 ETH * $132 vs. 12.5 BTC * $7,341, $15,840 ETH for $91,792.5 BTC.
This suggests that the BTC network should use roughly 5.8 times as much energy as ETH, to derive an equivalent profit per unit energy.
(You have to hover over Blockchain, Mining, and Energy to see the parameters.)
Why do you question the claim?
The power consumption doesn't scale between the two by the quanta of miners, it scales differently because the algorithms are different and thus the power consumed is different.
I have no idea how the algorithms differ nor how the difficulty differs among the two, so I don't have an intuition about how to guess whether or not they should scale relative to each other. I suspect that ethereum's market cap would be lower and probably have lower mining rewards therefore less capital invested in its global mining pool. I suspect that ethereum's algorithm requires more energy per block than bitcoin's, but I have a hard time guessing how much. Especially since it's a little less mature, maybe fewer ASIC miners so even less efficient in practice.
As you can see there are ~570k workers contributing to ~79k mining addresses. A lot of the data you see about "distinct miners" might be pools rather than your loner GPU miner.
Found one article on the subject: https://medium.com/ibbc-io/the-beautiful-complexity-of-pos-3...
My guess is another blockchain will execute PoS better because it won't have tech debt.
In mid-2018 they threw out that plan, choosing instead to implement PoS as an entirely separate chain, integrated with sharding. This entailed a delay of over a year, but it meant a minimum stake of 32 ETH instead of 1500, and an overall much more efficient and scalable system. There are three main phases, the first being the core proof-of-stake "beacon chain," which is currently running a multi-client testnet.
There have been various proposals for migrating legacy Ethereum into all this; here's the latest: https://ethresear.ch/t/alternative-proposal-for-early-eth1-e...
As with all engineering, it's a set of tradeoffs.
That's a bit of a stretch isn't it? Other than speculation and money laundering, I don't think any dapps have gained any traction at all, let alone a vibrant ecosystem.
Not a lot of traction yet, but definitely vibrant.
If you are an ancap, more power to you, but it's useful to have arguments that are persuasive to the huge majority of people who are not.
It's funny when things are presented this way. Ethereum was never intended to be a store of value. It's a distributed computer that needs its own token economy in order to charge "hosting costs" to the computational agents running on it, and to allow those agents to trade work done for other agents for transfer of "hosting costs."
Ethereum would still be doing what it's designed to do, even if the price of ETH tanked. (In fact, dapp developers would probably prefer ETH to tank, since that'd mean transactions would be cheaper and less crowded by speculative traders and selfish miners.)
Bitcoin most definitely has smart contracts.
https://tezos.com/ for one is pretty cool
