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Comment by thinkloop | Hacker News Reader

The idea that mining is a waste is a bit strange to me - of course it is a waste, that is the genius insight of it all. Waste is the most powerful thing, it is pure cost, the hardest thing to do, raw sacrifice. There are no tricks or shortcuts to over-taking the blockchain, just pure cost and waste. If the proof-of-work had value and could be sold, it would make the network less safe, and less predictable, subject to the whims of the market for its output, and able to fund its attackers while they attack. Proof-of-work is a nice way of saying proof-of-waste.

There are other types of consensus mechanisms, like proof-of-stake, that are much more energy efficient, with their own set of pros and cons. They should, and will, exist; but there will still always be at least one proof-of-waste blockchain. Waste is the gold-standard of expense.

The environment issue is a societal one. We need to move to clean energy, and we are.

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Two quibbles I have with this argument:

1. PoW based on waste which has massive negative externalities is abusive. Power generation generally has large negative externalities. Bitcoin kills.

2. PoS is just another type of PoW - people will compete to earn the PoS rewards up until they are "burning" 0.99 worth of potential ETH they could have earned (with stocks or bonds for example) for every 1 ETH they earn through PoW. The difference is, PoS has nearly 0 negative externalities and is funded entirely through capital which was created out of thin air, namely, ETH. The capital required to fund BTC's PoW comes externally. So switching to PoW is a capital-creating act and naturally increases the value of the currency & network.

Typo, I believe: switching to PoS is a capital-creating act, not PoW!

PoW is disgusting.

Yeah, I meant switching to PoS (damn tired parent brain)

Abusive is not a fair word. The system allows for something that was never before possible. Waste is how it works. Everything takes energy to accomplish, every input to a process is waste in the end. The total cost vs. benefit is what matters. We could each name many things in society that produce much more carbon, that are much less useful than a decentralized ledger - and no-one would call them abusive.

Call it what you want, but the language of "negative externality" is too clinical in my opinion when it refers to killing people and putting the stability of the entire planet at risk, especially when perfectly adequate non-destructive PoW systems exist, namely, PoS.

I am a fan of PoS, but it is still different from PoW, with its own set of risks and benefits. Decentralized databases are important and society should have redundancy in their implementations. PoW is still the gold standard.

There are many things that cost the environment much more than Bitcoin, that are much less useful (almost everything?), where is the resistance to those.

Basically if you use resources to build a machine that does something, or just burn the equivalent amount of resources to achieve the same thing, it's about the same.

Cruise ships probably harm the environment significantly more than Bitcoin, are you mad at them?

Would cruise ships still harm the environment more than an entire world economy based on PoW cryptocurrency?

It's not genius it's worse is better.

Any idiot can come up with the idea of competitively burning electricity to secure a source of truth. But it ignores what happens in x years time.

There is no efficiency that can ever be gained. It's a chart of value and lost energy forever extending up and to the right.

And in the world that's in a desperate need of both rethinking its energy usage and overhauling the energy sources, in a world in which everyone is politely asked to reduce their carbon footprint, this is the last thing we need - a platform for pure energy waste tied to unadulterated human greed. If I were an evil mastermind, worried that the world is escaping its doom by adopting clean energy too fast, this is what I would do.

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