Promoting Rigour in Blockchains Energy & Environmental Footprint Research: A Systematic Literature Review

TL;DR

This paper systematically reviews existing research on blockchain energy consumption, evaluates their reliability, and proposes codes of conduct to improve scientific rigor and standardization in future studies.

Contribution

It introduces a quality assessment framework and codes of conduct for research methodologies to enhance rigor and consistency in blockchain energy footprint studies.

Findings

Identified common issues in current energy consumption models

Developed a framework for assessing research quality

Proposed codes of conduct for methodological standardization

Abstract

There is a growing interest in understanding the energy and environmental footprint of digital currencies, specifically in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. These cryptocurrencies are operated by a geographically distributed network of computing nodes, making it hard to accurately estimate their energy consumption. Existing studies, both in academia and industry, attempt to model the cryptocurrencies energy consumption often based on a number of assumptions for instance about the hardware in use or geographic distribution of the computing nodes. A number of these studies has already been widely criticized for their design choices and subsequent over or under-estimation of the energy use. In this study, we evaluate the reliability of prior models and estimates by leveraging existing scientific literature from fields cognizant of blockchain such as social energy sciences and information systems. We first design a quality assessment framework based on existing research, we then conduct a systematic literature review examining scientific and non-academic literature demonstrating common issues and potential avenues of addressing these issues. Our goal with this article is to to advance the field by promoting scientific rigor in studies focusing on Blockchain's energy footprint. To that end, we provide a novel set of codes of conduct for the five most widely used research methodologies: quantitative energy modeling, literature reviews, data analysis \& statistics, case studies, and experiments. We envision that these codes of conduct would assist in standardizing the design and assessment of studies focusing on blockchain-based systems' energy and environmental footprint.