Raed S. Rasheed, Aiman A. Abusamra
This paper extends BlockSim by introducing energy-consumption and carbon-footprint metrics that are tightly integrated with its event-driven execution model, enabling sustainability-aware evaluation alongside conventional performance metrics. The proposed extension instruments core simulation events to estimate computational and communication energy at both node and network levels, then converts electricity demand to CO 2 emissions using an emission-factor formulation that can be configured to represent different grid carbon intensities. Using the extended simulator, controlled experiments are conducted on representative PoW and PoS consensus scenarios under varying miner populations and workloads. The framework reports aggregate energy and CO 2 , as well as normalized indicators per block and per transaction, supporting reproducible “what-if” analysis without external post-processing and enabling direct comparison of protocol configurations as networks scale. The framework additionally distinguishes economically driven Proof-of-Work (PoW) energy consumption, in which the expected mining reward and cryptocurrency price are explicit inputs, from validator-count-driven Proof-of-Stake (PoS) energy consumption; it varies the carbon emission factor across grid scenarios; and it is positioned as a scenario-based evaluation tool for preliminary what-if analysis rather than a precise real-world energy estimator.