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Comment by washedup | Hacker News Reader

Great comment, it articulates something I’ve had on the tip of my tongue but couldn’t express.

Energy usage itself is not a bad thing, it’s the energy source that can be environmentally problematic.

Currently 39% of mining power is driven by renewables [1]. It’s not much but a good start.

The simplest solution to speed this up would be to create a law requiring that all mining must come from renewable sources (or at least tax those that don’t). It would drive innovation, jobs, and make locations with renewable sources competitive places to live.

[1] https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/faculty-research/centres/alternati...

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The energy usage of itself is a red herring.

My issue is just how incredibly wasteful and inefficient PoW is. It's resource requirements completely disproportionate to the the underlying problem/solution space.

It offends my sensibilities and aesthetic appreciation of elegance in design. It is like contemplating a trillion record bubble sort.

It’s the most secure way to do it, which unfortunately requires the most energy... I have gone back and forth when considering PoS but fact of the matter is, PoW is the most secure today. Doesn’t mean there isn’t a better solution, so I totally agree that we need to try to find ways to trim the energy cost.

I'm not a fan of the economic incentives of Proof of Stake. Are there any new alternate proof systems that have been developed recently?

Hard to see the interesting projects in such a crowded field of crapcoins.

How are the economic incentives of Proof of Stake any different from Proof of Work?

The fundamental problem is that with PoS it's possible to dispose of your holdings yet still retain voting power (in the past, from the blockchain's perspective), whereas the same can't be done with PoW's mining equipment.

With PoS, withdrawing your stake (read: disposing of your holdings) withdraws your ability to act as a validator. And pretty much every mainstream PoS implementation imposes a delay on stake withdrawal to give the rest of the network time to make sure that whoever is withdrawing their stake hasn't already validated fraudulent transactions.

That's still fundamentally a weaker system, no? Specifically, still possible to double spend, the only difference is that we assume that the network wouldn't accept block re-orgs that are that long.

Regardless of where the energy comes from, it would be better spent on desperately needed carbon capture.

There is currently a $100 million prize out there. That should help a bit?

That's just for R&D. You still need a culture and policy that rewards deploying carbon capture on large scales.

Interesting stats in that citation. Hydropower dominates in the renewables category and North America has the highest regional share of renewables powered mining.

FYI, hydropower has a fixed capacity due to obvious limitations, namely viable rivers to dam up. There is basically no option for hydro expansion left on earth. In that light, I think the "sustainable mining" argument is pretty flawed. We can't scale hydro- and geothermal power, but we need it for base load in a sustainable future. It's the worst energy resource to occupy.

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