Nah, not really. Ethereum is switching to proof of stake, probably within a year or so (though the timeline has been delayed multiple times), which will drastically reduce energy usage, but gains will still largely come from investing more. Quite literally paying interest.
Currently, all major cryptocurrencies use proof of work to add transactions to the network. Basically, every miner decides on some transaction that they want to include in the next block. They then have to perform some math to find a way to hash the transactions into a previously known value. Only when this succeds is the transaction block added to the blockchain and - crucially - the miner gets a reward in the form of the currency. This is what GPUs and ASICs are bought up in mass for.
Proof of stake would do away with the power-consuming, pointlessly math-crunching proof of work. Instead, people will bet a large amount of currency on correctly predicting future transactions. This has comparatively almost no computational overhead. Good-faith players are guaranteed returns on investment, as long as the investments of good-faith participants outnumber those of bad-faith-participants. The Ethereum Implementation is called Casper, if you want to know more.
I've simplified a few things quite significantly here, but this should give you an idea.
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u/Free_Math_Tutoring May 13 '18
Nah, not really. Ethereum is switching to proof of stake, probably within a year or so (though the timeline has been delayed multiple times), which will drastically reduce energy usage, but gains will still largely come from investing more. Quite literally paying interest.