Argo & the Greening of Bitcoin
The green-ness of bitcoin is a constantly evolving story...
Many investors use the perceived huge power consumption as an excuse not to investigate or invest in crypto.
Crypto Proof of Work (PoW) does use huge amounts of power. However, huge power consumption is an issue in many industries. It is something that must be tackled.
Increasing use of renewable power is inevitable — brought on by public pressure AND legislation. Shareholders have forced changes at Exxon/Mobil & Chevron, while Shell was told by a Dutch court to dramatically accelerate the pace of decarbonization.
Argo Blockchain
Recently, Argo Blockchain has been at the forefront of greening bitcoin. The majority of their Bitcoin mining operations are powered by clean energy. What initially was voiced intentions in shareholder videos is now increasingly backed up with real actions….
- Texas — new facility to mine with majority renewable sources.
- Terra Pool — first Bitcoin mining pool powered exclusively by clean energy.
- Guidehouse appointed as Climate Strategy Advisor
- Signing of Crypto Climate Accord
- Argo joins newly-formed Bitcoin Mining Council
The famous 23th May meeting with Michael Saylor, Elon Musk, and Bitcoin Miners resulting in the formation of the Bitcoin Mining Council has gained most of the headlines…
…but I think another RNS is of much more interest…
14th May — Argo Blockchain Signs Crypto Climate Accord
Make Crypto Green
Inspired by the Paris Climate Agreement, the Accord is a private sector-led initiative for the entire crypto community focused on decarbonizing the cryptocurrency industry in record time. The goal is the transition crypto energy consumption to 100% renewables.
Currently all power usage data is self-survey data — it’s an estimate.
As I understand it, rather than trying to fork Bitcoin into ‘green’ bitcoin & ‘dirty’ bitcoin what the CCA is trying to create is transparency. That is: how green is the Bitcoin blockchain? Perhaps creating a Green Hashrate Index.
So if every ASIC gets digital identity — knows where it is — how much energy it uses — it’s hashrate. This combined can be collated and published as a Green Hashrate Index which can then be used to drive more renewable energy use and a greener hashrate.
(ASIC: application-specific integrated circuit: ie. an integrated circuit (IC) chip customized for a particular use)
The ePIC connection
What is the ePIC Blockchain deal going to provide…initial thoughts were better/faster/lower-powered BTC miners.
Amongst other things, ePIC creates state-of-the-art ASICs for Blockchain mining with the emphasis on high-performance & power-efficiency.
Argo has always described itself as a ‘blockchain technology company’. Recently there’s been a shift in Argo’s language increasingly referring to ‘crypto’ rather than Bitcoin. So which other crypto Argo blockchain could mine other than BTC?
Would this have to be PoW to take advantage of Argo’s mining fleet & experience?
On 15th May ePIC updated their miner code on GitHub to ‘change namespace from eth to etc’
https://github.com/epicblockchain/keccakminer
Ethereum Classic seems an odd choice as it’s a dead (or at least sleeping) crypto.
Keccakminer is an Ethash GPU mining worker: with keccakminer you can mine every coin which relies on an Ethash Proof of Work thus including Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Metaverse, Musicoin, Ellaism, Pirl, Expanse and others.
Why would they change to use Ethereum Classic?
I think ETC is a red-herring but enables the code to run on a blockchain similar to ETC which could just be a useful testbed. What could be similar to ETC?
Could the Argo/ePIC collaboration be working on an miner/validator for another chain?
Energy Web
Going back to that Crypto Climate Accord RNS and the CCA website to take a look at the leaders, one name stands out…
Energy web is a different kind of crypto project. It has a real use case — the goal is to accelerate energy transmission from fossil fuels to renewables
The management team has a wealth of experience in energy markets, banking, and blockchain and has already been extremely successful in signing up over 100 partners into it’s community including some of the largest utilities, grid operators, & renewable energy developers in the world.
Take a look at this impressive list of partners…
https://www.energyweb.org/work-with-us/our-affiliate-ecosystem/
EWT Token
EWT is a copy of ETH (the EVM is 100% compatible) — much like Binance Smart Chain.
It is 200,000x cheaper than Ethereum mainnet & faster due to a smaller (trusted) validator set.
Here’s a comparison…
Yes. Read that bottom line again. An energy chain focusing on renewable energy should use as little energy as possible.
Instead of miners it has validators. The Energy Web Chain is one of the only public blockchains among any industry worldwide whose validator nodes are run by known corporations, many of them some of the largest and most-respected energy companies globally.
https://energyweb.org/technology/energy-web-chain/validator-network/
The Energy Web Token (EWT) has multiple uses. The token protects the network against misbehavior, compensates validators via transaction fees and block validation awards, and can be used to pay for middleware services that streamline and enhance dApps.
As well as validators, the energy web blockchain has utility nodes providing services.
Energy Grid
The global energy grid is changing. Centralised systems that generate at large scale in few places and pump into the grid to many receivers need to evolve into more distributed grids where energy is generated at multiple micro locations. If generated & consumed locally this vastly reduces transmission losses and moves the energy mix further towards renewable sources.
There is a massive retail adoption of home installations of solar & geothermal. Plus electric vehicles & other batteries (even mobile phones) that can be used for load balancing. But how could this be managed?
Energy Web are aiming to ‘Air B&B’ every single electric device on the planet with an IoT sensor so it can seamlessly participate in energy markets. This is a massive undertaking.
They’ve already started, here are a few highlights:
Could the Argo/ePIC collaboration be connected with this, perhaps to create a micro-miner to use excess energy from (say) a Tesla Powerwall?
A Bit More Detail
There is masses of information on the Energy Web website and elsewhere. Here are a few resources I found useful.
This is a recent vid — explains energy web well…
A slightly older one with more detail from BlockchainBrad…
What’s also clear from this is CCO Jesse Morris is a great communicator — reminds me of Argo’s Peter Wall.
EWT Staking
EWT staking is coming soon (perhaps one of the reasons kraken was chosen for EWT token listing)
Tokens can be locked up in projects (utility nodes) as they need them for operations. Utility Nodes (cloud services) require EWT tokens which can be accepted from community.
This is much like Delegated PoS (Polkadot)
Conclusion
I have no specific conclusion except both Argo Blockchain and Energy Web are extremely interesting in their own right. Both tackling energy usage in crypto from different angles. The combination could be very exciting and timely.
(I have holdings of both ARB & EWT)
Further Reading
HSV’s superb overview of Energyweb…
Some useful videos…
Collection of Chico Crypto vids — handily time-stamped to the excerpts relating to Energy Web…
