The energy consumption of Proof-of-Stake systems: Replication and expansion

TL;DR

This paper investigates the energy consumption of proof-of-stake blockchain systems, replicating and expanding previous models to compare their efficiency with proof-of-work and non-PoS systems, confirming PoS's significantly lower energy use.

Contribution

It improves an existing PoS energy model and provides a comprehensive comparison of PoS systems with other blockchain consensus mechanisms.

Findings

PoS systems have much lower energy consumption than PoW systems.

Significant differences exist in energy use among different PoS systems.

PoS energy consumption is several orders of magnitude below Bitcoin Core.

Abstract

Blockchain technology and, more generally, distributed ledger technology (DLT) systems, face public scrutiny for their energy consumption levels. However, many point out that high energy consumption is a feature of (small block size) proof-of-work (PoW) DLTs, but not of proof-of-stake (PoS) DLTs. With the energy consumption of PoS systems being an under-researched area, we replicate, expand and update embryonary work modelling it and comparing different PoS-based DLTs with each other and with other non-PoS systems. In doing so, we suggest and implement a number of improvements to an existing PoS energy consumption model. We find that there may be significant differences in the energy consumption of PoS systems analysed and confirm that, regardless of these differences, their energy consumption is several orders of magnitude below that of Bitcoin Core.