Making Crown (CRW) Carbon Neutral
A starting point for discussion
Preamble
Cryptocurrencies aren’t generally known for being energy efficient. Take the leading market capitalization project (Bitcoin), which as we write uses around 4.8 TeraWatt hours (TWh) per month in electricity. This equates to about 58 TWh per year and about 28 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) released into the atmosphere each year (Source https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption).
1 TWh is enough electricity to power one million one-bar electric fires for one thousand hours (nearly 42 days).
MN-PoS
Since April 2019, Crown’s new consensus algorithm “Masternode Proof of Stake” or MN-PoS has successfully processed hundreds of thousands of blocks. MN-PoS is highly efficient since ordinary virtual private servers (VPS) are used to process transactions while also securing the network by providing full copies of the blockchain.
Foundation
Recently, contributors took part in a discussion to more thoroughly consider Crown’s energy usage and CO2 footprint. It’s hard to get exact figures so we decided to work backwards from the figure of $5 per month per node. This is a fairly typical cost for the VPS which node operators are likely to be using. It’s still hard to pin down how much of this cost is electricity and therefore how much CO2 one node generates.
We simplify the calculation by assuming all of the $5 is spent on electricity and ignore rent, staff, insurance and other costs. This is a higher, conservative estimate and with more scientific analysis could be lowered, but to cover us from argument and accusations, $5 is our starting point. We would like the community to help us refine our power usage and even expand upon our estimates.
To calculate the electricity usage per node we need a figure for the cost of electricity per kWh. The commercial rate varies widely around the world. We calculated an average value of $0.19 per kWh given the geographic distribution of the Crown network.
Finally, to calculate the amount of CO2 generated we assume a worst-case scenario of all coal-fired power stations. According to IPCC these generate 346kg of CO2 per MWh.
Calculation
$5 avg. VPS cost / 0.19c per kWh = 26.3 kWh per node per month,
26.3 kWh * 1800 nodes= 47.37 MWh per month,
47.37 MWh * 346kg CO2 per MWh = 16389kg of CO2 per month.
TL;DR
Crown produces at the very most an estimated 16.39 tonnes of CO2 per month using 1800 Masternodes and Systemnodes as the example.
We added a CO2 page to the Crown Platform Monitor where you can see an estimate of the “realtime” monthly CO2 burden created by the Crown network.
Implementation
With this knowledge we could create monthly or quarterly governance proposals to offset the Crown network CO2 footprint to become carbon neutral or even negative. Proposals could be made by an elected volunteer.
The community would need to consider other associated costs like marketing etc.
Feedback
What are your thoughts on the matter? Let us know via Discord or Telegram.
