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There's a lot in the news about the energy cost of Bitcoin recently. Recently Elon Musk talked about "currencies using <1% the energy per transaction of BTC".

This page provides some values for comparison:

Kilowatt hour (KWh) consumed per transaction

XRP

0.0079

Dogecoin

0.12

Cardano

0.5479

Litecoin

18.522

Bitcoin Cash

18.957

Ethereum

62.56

Bitcoin

707

My understanding is that coin generation gets more difficult the more coins are mined, so I'm wondering is Ethereum for example actually 10X more efficient, or has it simply not been around as long so the calculations haven't grown in complexity?

Are energy costs per transaction for all these currencies going to scale with number of transactions in some well-defined way, or have I misunderstood?

Mr. Boy
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    I’m voting to close this question because it's not related to cryptography. – AleksanderCH May 14 '21 at 11:52
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    @AleksanderRas so where should it be asked? You have a tag for it, and SE doesn't seem to have a generic cryptocurrency area... any ideas? – Mr. Boy May 14 '21 at 13:10
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    I believe the Bitcoin Stack Exchange allows questions about other cryptocurrencies, but I am not sure, so you should check – user253751 May 15 '21 at 11:00
  • It's an economics problem, probably economics SE. – SAI Peregrinus May 15 '21 at 18:11
  • I think the question may be on topic, at least partially. The energy consumption in crypto currencies is driven by the mining effort (in Bitcoin, proof of work ). A comparison of the different "proof of X" required by each cryptocurrency feels like something in the domain of crypto. I know too little about most of the currencies listed, but I would welcome the answer of someone more knowledgeable. How that translates to KWh or actual money, on the other hand, is certainly out of scope. – Sergio A. Figueroa May 17 '21 at 17:57
  • This is a question about the inner workings of crypto currencies and how that relate to energy consumption. Is that really not the purview of a cryptography site? – Mr. Boy Jun 02 '21 at 09:36

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