Let me tell you a little story you might want to remember, so you can tell your grandchildren. This is how you might tell them:
"You think algorithms are hard, little children? You don't want to stay up to date? Well gather round, gather round, let gramps give you a sense of human folly and just how far we have come. Maybe that will let you appreciate how lucky you have it.
"Way back before all these modern doodads, gizmos, and doohickeys, back in aught 9, or "two thousand and nine" as we called it, mathematicians were so clueless about algorithms that they made distributed databases resistant to sybil attacks through proof of work doing random-ass hashes. What that meant is instead of figuring out how to prove nodes weren't colluding, we made them prove they were burning oil - or gas - or coal - or sunlight, or whatever they wanted. But they had to throw their hands up and come up with a random hash, to prove that they were really all working on the problem.
"By 2018, the resulting worldwide bitcoin database used 30.1 terrawatt-hours of power per year to perform the work that a $20 dedicated chip could do in the size of a container of tic-tacs. And that $20 includes 100 gb, a dedicated microcontroller, and 5 years worth of alkeline batteries. The database size borders on nil.
"All because we didn't know any better. That is something like $3,848,100,000 in 2018 money - three billion dollars spent on doing $20 worth of work.
"To put this into perspective, imagine that in 1802, Merriam Webster had purchased fifty thousand tumblers, into which it put printed plates, and then hired fifty thousand workers to open each one every few minutes, and count to see if it had managed to assemble the plates into alphabetical order. (This is called bogosort.)
"Well, if you don't know that there is such a thing as a sorting algorithm, if it's unknown to science, then perhaps bogosort is the best you can do. Such was the state of distributed blockchains in 2018.
"So you need to be thankful for what you have. Oh but it's tough! You have to think it through! Well in my day nobody thought it through. We just shoveled thirty terawatts of coal into furnaces and made little kids cry when they couldn't afford gaming equipment anymore, since all of it was being used to get around the fact that nobody sat down and did the math for a $20 distributed database.
"you kids have it printed in black and white. sit down and learn. we had to take electricity from schools and hospitals, to raise the sealevel to where parts of Hawaii had to be evacuated. This stuff has consequences. Learn your algorithms. Trillions of watts died for them."