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Developers

Is there anything the Internet Computer Protocol is doing or anything about the technology that makes it an environmentally sustainable option?

THE INTERNET COMPUTER'S SUSTAINABILITY IMPACT COMPARED TO OTHER BLOCKCHAINS:

The IC's consensus algorithm uses a voting mechanism that does not waste power on computing hashes of artificial difficulties, instead devoting that power to the real computation of user programs that do useful work.

We expect to see some real-world numbers of power usage soon, but the IC network is much more energy efficient than Proof-of-Work-based blockchains.

 

THE INTERNET COMPUTER'S SUSTAINABILITY IMPACT COMPARED TO CLASSICAL DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS:

The IC has overhead due to:

  1. Replication (identical instances of each canister are replicated across multiple nodes).
  2. IC Protocol (including P2P gossip, consensus, DKG, certification).

The overhead is not dissimilar to any distributed system that involves replication. But on a subnet with a reasonable workload, the majority of resources (CPU, memory) would be used by actual canister code execution.

Updated