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Comment by jki275 | Hacker News Reader

Tezos and Cardano are the top two cryptocurrencies that don't use this model at all. They use proof of stake, which doesn't consume any significant amount of electricity.

Also, the vast majority of the electricity being consumed for bitcoin mining is hydro in China and has nothing to do with climate change.

Also, equating bitcoin to cryptocurrency isn't accurate at all. There are hundreds of others.

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> the vast majority of the electricity being consumed for bitcoin mining is hydro in China

Side concern but isn’t this concentration a red flag? Likely many miners are in China or Russia due to the electricity prices. Can’t they collude to execute a 51% attack?

They could and can. The problem with both PoW and PoS is concentration of consensus/trust over time I think. There are models I've seen that break that up somewhat in PoW and potentially other forms by relying on something that is hard to concentrate (e.g. the market for consumer grade CPU's, social networks, etc). I would like something that anyone can run, but has some natural barrier that prevents it from being centralised.

That's proof of stake. Look at Cardano and Tezos.

They possibly can. Nearly all of them are in China, and nearly all of them are owned by a single company that manufactures the ASIC processors that do the mining.

This is why I'm not a bitcoin maximalist and I'm not a huge fan of it. I have a suspicion that eventually it will fail.

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