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Comment by speedgoose | Hacker News Reader

> ECC is used as the cryptographic key algorithm in Bitcoin because it potentially can save ~90% of the resources used by a similar RSA system.

But bitcoin is a waste of resources by design. The whole point is to waste resources.

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Disregarding the quibbling about what is waste and what isn't, there's a difference between the work done to validate blocks and work done for the PoW based Nakamoto consensus. You want block validation to be as fast as possible which is a separate concern from deciding on a chain which is where you want lots of work.

Bitcoin wants to waste resources for a specific operation - which is to prove that work was performed. The other aspects of bitcoin, such as sending transactions and validating transactions, have no need to waste resources and are designed to be efficient.

A good analogy is password hashes. If you have a hashed value, it is expensive to find the original input. If you want to check that an input is equal to the hashed value, that is a cheap operation.

I feel it's like a coal power plant bragging about sustainability because they use a calculator with a solar panel on one desk.

  > But bitcoin is a waste of resources by design. The whole point is to waste resources.

The miners run POW (i.e. waste resources), and requires specialist hardware (ASICs). Validating blocks is done by "nodes" and is within the capabilities of typical consumer hardware. Both operations serve different purposes in securing the network.

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