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Comment by AznHisoka | Hacker News Reader

Which is more beneficial to society? Proof of work or entertaining people?

If we only get to pick one as a society, entertaining people, hands down.

Society happily survived without proof of work for millennia, but I think it’s important to remember that entertainment is the good part of life that proof of work is ultimately supposed to enable.

I mean this in the same sense the founding fathers did when the wrote stuff like:

>“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.”

That is, proof of work is the tradeoff that ultimately should enable people’s personal entertainment and happiness.

If more of the former means less of the latter, I think we are in a bad way.

Proof of work (like most cryptography) is a mechanism to bootstrap social trust using computation as a substitute for human interaction.

The question is not whether society does fine without proof of work, but whether the PoW mechanism generates marginal trust at a lower cost than the existing social and institutional mechanisms. Lawyers, police, and the legal and state apparatus are expensive, centralized, and slow. Humans (especially educated, first world humans) are also energetically expensive to run!

Basically, you are only accounting for the cost of PoW, which are trivial to measure, but not carefully accounting for the benefits, which are difficult.

At the current usage level, bitcoin uses as much power as about 280'000 homes (US, 340 Megawatts total, [1]).

You can put an awful lot of lawyers, police, legal and state apparatus in 280'000 homes.

It is sufficient to house all state and full-time employees of the state of Illinois [0] entirely, which unlike bitcoin can do more than transfer wealth.

Illinois has a population of 12'800'000 people [2], bitcoin.info "claims" 23 Million wallet users, however that is a poor number since it only seems to count the number of wallet addresses ever used, the number of unique addresses used is closer to 500'000 and the number of daily users is 200'000 at the current date, which with some rough statistics yields a more realistic 3-8 million users.

In conclusion: Employing humans to do the entire state things allows to service 1.5 to 4 times as many people as bitcoin is currently doing and it also includes a much much broader range of services than bitcoin.

[0]: http://www.governing.com/gov-data/public-workforce-salaries/... [1]: https://www.thebalance.com/how-much-power-does-the-bitcoin-n... [2]: https://suburbanstats.org/population/how-many-people-live-in...

340 Megawatts, at $0.12 / kWh, works out to around $340mm / year, or a permanent army of 2500 lawyers or so.

I agree that bitcoin's PoW mechanism as it is today has relatively poor bang for your buck, but there are many potential mechanisms for increasing efficiency by an order of magnitude or more (dPoS, state channels, sharding, etc.).

Ethereum has a lot more potential to not just be a distributed ledger, but a distributed secured computer. If all you are interested in is moving around value, something like Nano might achieve that while burning far less computation that the Bitcoin network would require per transactions.

We should keep in mind that when discussing Bitcoin we're comparing the first version of a nascent technology to mature financial institutions that have developed over hundreds of years.

I don’t think you can directly compare the two since the price of bitcoin, and thus value of the block rewards, is speculation on the future usage of bitcoin.

You hit the nail on the head but it's in contradiction with your point. Proof of work frees us from the burdens associated with protecting ourselves so that we can perform creative functions. Clearly a GPU, as a general purpose chip, is not well spent performing proof of work over something that amplifies one's creativity. But pow with asics, which couldn't have been used for that purpose, certainly helps. You could argue both are wasteful -- but an investment in security is an investment in creativity by providing a safe environment

I think you are being a little grandiose. PC video games is just one specialised form of entertainment. There are so many other ways to entertain people which are unaffected by high demand for graphics cards.

Entertaining people, without a question. Proof of work tries to substitute wasteful consumption for trustworthiness, which is a fool's errand.

You could also say it’s arbitraging energy for trusted computation, which is a generous rephrasing that acknowledges its potential. There might be cases where such an arbitrage is worth it.

PoW turns an O(log n) transaction into an O(n) one, where n is the number of transaction-handling entities.

Nowhere else is this kind of thing celebrated.

> PoW turns an O(log n) transaction into an O(n) one

This is a weird critique. Blockchains and banks are very different in their use cases. It’s like you’re criticizing someone for choosing a sorting algorithm over a deduplication algoritihm - they do vaguely the same thing, but no one likes the sorting algorithm because it’s less efficient, they like it because it actually sorts.

If you are choosing a blockchain (algorithm A) over a bank (algorithm B), you are doing so because you want the things a blockchain offers that a bank doesn’t. You can’t do comparative algorithm analysis on algorithms that aren’t comparable.

Except that it's just few people (libertarians and criminals) that care about difference between A and B; the vast majority is using it as a get-rich-quick scheme. Moreover, as a society we don't need what algorithm A provides, we're fine with algorithm B + little bit of trust in the mix.

Or, think of it this way: requiring trust is not a bug, it's a feature. Trust is the "clever hack" humans have that allows us to coordinate at scale without absurdly wasteful solutions like blockchain. From this POV, bitcoin as a part of global economy is making a step backwards.

I don’t necessarily disagree with anything you’re saying. But my point stands: the critique I responded to was incoherent.

There's also machine learning.

Proof of work - as proven by the fact that this is what the resources are being spent to provide.

The resources were spent on obvious speculation, which adds less than zero value to humans (other than speculators).

As an analogy, if resources are spent on war, I think it's not so far fetched to say that there is an extraordinary amount of waste in terms of human talent, life, physical infrastructure, and diverted resources. Just because someone spends money doesn't mean it was well spent (unless you measure such things in money).

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