The Earth is Dying: Uninstall Minecraft

A comprehensive apples-to-apples energy comparison between Minecraft and Ethereum, and why the Microsoft web3 ban has darker implications.

Recently, Microsoft announced a blanket ban on anything web3 in anything Minecraft. This comes as a complete shock from a game that, as an open and limitless Sandbox, historically caters to a lot of vitriol filth (hate speech, illegal activity, harassment). Minecraft lets you do anything — good or bad (just not NFTs). This isn’t the article to discuss that, however. There are plenty of other sources you can dig through.

The news comes as a shock to web3 proponents who understand Minecraft as home to the first crypto-gaming buildouts, spanning back over a decade. It comes as a resounding victory to many of its fans who are disturbed by energy consumption and the capacity for NFTs to alienate gamers through further predatory practices in an industry built around fucking over the consumer.

The article below will touch on a few topics:

1. How much energy does Minecraft actually use?

2. “But alas, you participate in society somewhat!”

3. The real extent of the “web3 Minecraft problem”

4. Microsoft’s ulterior motives?

Basically: How much energy Minecraft uses => debunking the argument of “your thing bad, my thing good” => scoping the (very miniscule) activity that did exist in crypto Minecraft =>

Read: I actually am an expert

Before we get in, a bit on myself. I believe I am one of the most informed individuals on the entire planet at the intersection of web3 and Minecraft. It’s a very small intersection: most crypto Minecraft servers are grifts targeted at investors who are unfamiliar with Minecraft (they can advertise unlocking their token to a playerbase of 100 million without token holders understanding why that’s a bogus statement).

I was originally introduced to crypto through a Bitcoin Minecraft casino in 2013. You can see me sourcing $1 BTC referrals for server signups on Youtube. I wrote articles about the most popular Bitcoin Minecraft servers several market cycles ago. I was the first ever person to post to the EnjinCoin subreddit (I am also permanently showdow banned on the Enjin forums for questioning their EnjinCoin ethics — again a topic for another post).

I have poured many thousands of hours into modded Minecraft multiplayer on all sides (playing, architecting, moderating, developing) and I am among the most well versed in the world in crypto. I wish my “worldwide highest percentile ranking” was in something cooler than “Crypto Minecraft”, but alas…

Yes, Minecraft Actually Consumes similar Energy to Ethereum

The flagship argument against a blanket opposition to crypto is energy consumption. We will compare Ethereum to Minecraft because web3, NFT, and other catchalls today are virtually synonymous with Ethereum. Yes Bitcoin uses more energy than Bitcoin. But nobody does things with Bitcoin. Bitcoin today is super cringe and I will not dispute that.

Anyways, let’s dive in. Note that I’m going to be collecting as much relevant data as I can. Most of this stuff is unfortunately dated. I will be making educated guesses. I am also not a data scientist. These numbers below are not going to be 100% accurate. But they will exist within some ballpark that substantiates the conversation regardless of how wrong I am in either direction.

For Comparison: Ethereum Energy Consumption

In March 2022, it was published that Ethereum mining globally consumes about 112 terawatt-hours per year. Hash rate is down about 10-15% since this figure was polled. To make things easy, let’s say that today, Ethereum is responsible for 100 terawatt-hours.

Crypto nerds know that this number isn’t nearly as important as critics make it out to be: Ethereum likely retires mining altogether within the next ~3 months. That will send the energy consumption down 99.99% (making Ethereum magnitudes more energy efficient than Minecraft). But we all know that you can’t assume that’s the case until it actually happens, yada yada, etc.

Minecraft’s Energy Consumption: Servers

NOTE: “Minecraft server” also refers to someone’s customized, online Minecraft multiplayer world. Server (hardware) and Minecraft server (gaming content) are both used below.

Minecraft is a lot more difficult to pinpoint than Ethereum. Unfortunately, a lot of necessary data isn’t readily available. I will have to take some historical data and make some estimations on current day statistics

The most difficult estimation is how many Minecraft servers are running at any given time and how much energy consumption those servers are responsible for.

Understand that Minecraft is fairly unique in its server architecture. There is very little “official” Minecraft presence. Almost all players are opting in to private, custom servers modified by the server’s owners to fit the ambitions of the creator. Each online, customized Minecraft instance is backed by one-or-more high end, enterprise/data center level computer server.

In 2016, there were around 55,000 of these computer services running concurrently. Unfortunately, I cannot find anything more recent. Today, I estimate that number is closer to 500,000. The biggest contributor to this growth is simply attributed to player growth, which has also 5x’d in the same time.

Obviously, 55,000 x 5 is nowhere near 500,000. Where does the inflation come from? A few important trends:

Minecraft architecture is increasingly robust.

The very highest end servers still suffer from considerable performance struggles on popular and highly modded Minecraft servers. Each player interaction is permanently increasing storage burden. Owners have mitigated these risks through several strategies: recurringly “wiping” or resetting the world (clearing the cache, so to speak); placing concurrent player limits and enforcing separate queues to get into the server; efficiency improvements on server mods (eliminating spaghetti).

Between 2016 and 2022, something very big has also happened: The community figured out sharding (quicker than Vitalik, might I add). There were very limited and questionably effective examples of developers sharding players in their Minecraft world across many different servers. This practice is fairly commonplace today. A world from 2016 may exist today with the exact same playerbase as before, but now it is 5 or 10 or 50 servers instead of 1. The servers-per-player should have increased since 2016 as server owners now have access to intelligent sharding mechanisms.

Fellas are gaming more.

Time spent gaming continues to trend up, and covid accelerated this movement. I am unable to find a graphic that shows average hours gaming from 2016-2022, but some more recent data suggests a strong trend exists.

Of course, this data is all gaming, not just Minecraft—but there’s nothing that particularly pinpoints Minecraft as an outlier. Playerbase may be up 5x from 2016, but playtime is up a higher multiple than that. And server growth is dependent on playtime moreso than number of players.

Servers never Die

Like any good sandbox, Minecraft player-driven content is upOnly. People keep building, and that includes launching new servers. As each individual server becomes more or less popular over time, old servers are replaced with new ones. But not every server owner shuts its doors when they are past-prime. Assuredly, >0% of inactive servers stay online, even with newly spun up servers absorbing their old playerbases. (If you don’t find this to be the case, go look at playercounts across the “sponsored community” EnjinCoin Minecraft servers — if you can find that list).

Additionally, the notion of upOnly player driven content means that Minecraft servers are becoming increasingly robust and customized. This means they are increasingly data-intensive and increasingly require more resources (computer servers) to cater to the same playerbase.

Bands are Up

Many Minecraft servers are money making businesses. People are spending a lot more $$ on video games today and through Covid than they were in 2016. More $$ going around means more servers rented to offer competitive performance to their prospective playerbase.

Adding this all up. It looks like these high end servers (which are the norm for Minecraft) average around 10k kwh per year. At 500,000 servers, Minecraft multiplayer servers are responsible for five terawatt-hours per year.

Minecraft Energy Consumption: Players

Of course, much of the Minecraft energy consumption is from people, well, playing the game.

At any given point in time there are 4 million concurrent Minecraft players globally.

Converting Minecraft playtime to kwh actually proves to be a bit more difficult than I had expected. There are very wide estimates of 0.4 kwh on the low end to 10 kwh on the high end per 24hrs of gaming.

My best intuition is that the real rate is probably closer to 2.5 kwh. Globally, energy consumption from playing Minecraft sits at just under four terawatt-hours per year.

Minecraft Energy Consumption: Streaming

This is the hardest one to quantify, but Minecraft is very very big in streaming and videomaking. Youtube is the biggest offender, and this component will just focus on that.

Minecraft is the most watched video game on Youtube, with over one trillion views globally.

Elsewhere, we know that the average gaming Youtube video is just under 25 minutes and the average viewer watches about 50% of a video.

One trillion views was hit over six months ago, putting 15 trillion total minutes at a fair estimate.

Now, how much energy is used streaming videos seems to be an ongoing, hot button topic. This report, which includes several rounds of back-and-forth from another report that disagrees, suggests that one hour of streaming translates to 0.77 kwh of energy consumed.

Since inception, individuals watching Minecraft on Youtube are responsible for about 20 terawatt-hours of energy consumption.

This metric includes just streaming, not uploading. Minecraft is, of course, also very popular on Twitch plus other platforms, too.

Adding it all up: Minecraft vs Ethereum

To summarize, Ethereum currently clocks in at 100 terawatt-hours per year while Minecraft falls much lower at 8.65. Minecraft is also clocking in 20 terawatt-hours from consumption of Youtube videos and likely a similar amount from global Twitch activity, Youtube uploads, and other auxiliary activities (call it 35 twh total).

Obviously, we’re still a ways a way from showing that Minecraft consumes more than Ethereum.

In order to make my clickbait title real, we simply need to look at historical energy consumption to tie the knot.

Ethereum energy consumption was hyperbolic until recently (and getting that 99.95% soon). Global consumption likely does not exceed 250 twh by the time the merge happens.

Minecraft, on the other hand, probably sees a more linear growth in energy consumption since the game launched in 2009. Let’s say that from 2009-2012, it used 1/10 what it now users yearly (0.865 kwh) and increased linearly for a decade. Adding in our streaming energy, and Minecraft weighs in at about 80 twh (conservative) - 1/3 of Ethereum. And with Ethereum’s merge sending energy consumption down tremendously, Minecraft global energy likely eclipses Ethereum’s by the end of the decade.

Of course, there are other considerations like Microsoft’s energy consumption (curiously, they seem to have bought a lot of research to suggest that their energy consumption is actually good for the environment). But Ethereum also has peripherals, though nobody is streaming Ethereum rugpull speedruns on Youtube.

Anyways, do your part and stop playing Minecraft. The Earth is dying for fuck’s sake!

“Well Minecraft is good. Ethereum is bad. Here is why:”

The point of this article isn’t to tell you that you are burning our planet by digging up virtual diamonds. Understand that only a handful of entities have all the power to sway emissions one way or another, and US politicks isn’t a democracy any more, the individual has no sway in make sure those who be do the right thing.

Minecraft is awesome! I learned a lot about economics, coding, and even found out about crypto through it.

Crypto is awesome, too! I have been obsessed with it my entire adult life (and then some) and have carved out a nice career for myself along with many countless others.

Nobody is forcing you to do crypto and nobody is forcing crypto into your games (this was never the case of Minecraft, more below). NFTs aren’t even a great strategy for EA to squeeze more profit out of you (why would they let you resell the FIFA player you re-purchased every year?)

The financialization of digital economies has been ongoing for many decades, and will continue with or without crypto. Guess what: you always got to choose whether or not you participated in those types of games! Most gamers never touched Eve Online, Entropia Universe, or Old School Runescape. But many have, many loved them, and many earned a lot of coin for doing good in those games.

Crypto is a powerful tool to take the hyper-competitive economic MMOs to the next level. It probably won’t do much of anything in other types of games outside of leverage a marketing ploy for ape jpeg holders to spend a lot of money on some indie game studio they otherwise wouldn’t care about (web3 paying game developers well while average game dev earns less than minimum wage is a good thing, too, btw).

The message isn’t “don’t knock it till you try it”, the message is calm down, nobody is going to shove this down your throat (because it doesn’t make economic sense to do so). Just like how other progressive movements in history which were feared for “converting” the youth never happened.

Back to Microsoft: Were NFTs a problem?

So from above, we know that many millions of players are active on Minecraft at any given time.

Understand that these players self-select which servers they play in and only see exposure to web3 tech in servers modified to support them.

Understand that NFTWorlds was, by far, the biggest and most active Minecraft server, which maxed out in its hay day at 400 concurrent players (I don’t have figures, but probably closer to 100 when the announcement came).

NFTWorlds was probably around 90% of all web3 Minecraft gameplay at the time of the ban, but let’s say of those estimated 100 players there were 20% of all web3 Minecraft players. That’s 500 out of 4 million, or 0.0125% of the playerbase.

The amount of children being contaminated by and taken advantage of through exposure to NFTs in Minecraft is exactly (not approximately) zero.

Additionally, Minecraft has historically been an interesting place to experiment with crypto. I have strong suspicions against anyone less than a superstar developer creating a sustainable crypto-Minecraft mashup, but nonetheless it’s something that intrigues a lot of builders.

Crypto projects have been built with a focus on Minecraft for some time. EnjinCoin saved Enjin, who was responsible for hosting virtually all Minecraft server community forums. Without EnjinCoin, Minecraft maybe doesn’t escape its own bear market as easily and come out so strong on top.

Microsoft has previously endorsed this. They signed a partnership with Enjin not too long ago.

The Real Reason: Minecraft has a Profit Problem

Minecraft has sold many many hundreds of millions of copies of the game, but Microsoft has been trying to tackle how to keep coin in the system after purchase.

The most engaged players go onto these modded Minecraft networks and spend thousands of hours plus sometimes thousands of dollars of which Minecraft doesn’t see a penny.

Hypixel, the most popular Minecraft server with around 50,000+ concurrent players, is a hugely successful, multi-multi million dollar empire existing entirely as modified Minecraft servers.

Despite accounting for only 1-2% of playtime activity, Hypixel likely earns well into eight figures in revenue, a figure that brushes double digits of Minecraft’s own earnings.

NFTWorlds, mentioned above, also earned over $10 million from their NFT trading secondary sales.

So, you are Microsoft, and you see these servers generating millions on millions within their game and in a manner you have no access to. How do you insert yourself?

Introducing Minecoins and Minecraft Marketplace

Microsoft has been pushing their own metacurrency/metamarket as an umbrella layer on top of all of these Minecraft servers to do essentially what each of these prospective NFT projects were attempting to build out in a first party manner.

Think steam marketplace but introduced 10 years after they built TF2 as free and open for all to do whatever they want with it.

NFTWorlds demonstrated its ability to create its own metacurrency/metamarket in a more successful and better revenue generating capacity than Microsoft itself. Why try to compete when you can just remove it?

Microsoft Sucks. Stop Simping for Corporations. It’s Cringe.

I conclude with the following:

Simping for massive corporations and governance and regurgitating their talking points they spend countless advertising dollars to convince you of is super cringe. Think for yourself or at the very least simp for a not multi-billion dollar conglomerate directly responsible for the many global economic and social issues that engulf society today.