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Comment by 7373737373 | Hacker News Reader

PoW isn't "Proof of Work", it's "proof of money spent". The "work" is only here to make crypto look sophisticated. We could replace "work" with videos of miners burning stacks of cash, & crypto would work just the same, without killing polar bears. Downside: it would look stupid.

https://twitter.com/Tr0llyTr0llFace/status/99607543853872332...

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Cryptocurrency and Blockchain is easily the most misunderstood technology thats existed. I blame ICO youtube videos that propagated the myth that Blockchain is going to cause a revolution.

Blockchain ONLY exists to decentralize and validate.

This is useful for currencies, voting, timestamps, and maybe a few other niches.

Centralized applications are cheaper and faster than blockchain. You wouldnt use blockchain unless you needed the decentralized validation worth paying for.

Users like OP mentioned doesnt understand what the Work is doing. Most people who 'know' crypto, have no idea what blockchain is.

The only people worth listening to are ones that spend crypto and have developed. Everyone else are parroting myth.

Given how blockchain operates the only viable use case is currency:

https://medium.com/@jimmysong/why-blockchain-is-hard-60416ea...

Decentralized consensus can have far, far more wide reaching applications than the ones you mentioned, IMO.

Also you're not considering the potential benefits of on-chain governance/smart contracts.

Can you explain?

That doesn’t make any sense. The cost of a particular PoW can vary enormously. Mining a Bitcoin block in Hawaii using a CPU will cost orders of magnitude more than doing it in Iceland with an ASIC, but they are treated identically in the network. It’s proof of work. It just so happens that work costs money.

It should be Proof or Waste, or Proof of Heat/Entropy. The work being done is difficult, yet trivial and only valuable because it yields coins. Miners convert free energy into heat, for funny money, and it doesn’t scale well. Sure, maybe PoS could work (I doubt it) and maybe renewables could be the future of mining. Unfortunately we’re stuck with a majority of miners burning coal in China to show off the required volume of entropy to cash in.

When this fad dies, it will have been historically significant in terms of pure waste.

Yes, it’s really unfortunate that bitcoin doesn’t use a PoW that performs useful computations as a side effect.

No, it's work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_(physics)

What exactly gets displaced here, other than our hopes and dreams for better future?

Producing the work needs to cost money though for it to be viable.

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