Hacker News Reader

Comment by fardo | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com