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Comment by Matthias1 | Hacker News Reader

> Without mining, less electricity is used in mining, and less silicon is used in mining chips. Are these resources available for extra production? Yes. However, these “non-wasted” resources are offset by other resources which are “wasted”.

This would seem to be the main argument of that second article you posted summarizing the economics around PoS. The idea is that if you’re backing your crypto with itself (like in a PoS), the value that is locked in the staking system could be doing something else. (This is a very real point in that it doesn’t help decentralization—the same people that would stake their coin could spend that money mining Bitcoin.)

But it doesn’t seem to address any points in the conversation around the ethics of using electricity as a basis for proof of work.

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Electricity is the best form of energy to use as the basis for Proof of Work, because there is no pre-requisite on how to generate the required electricity.

compare: electric cars vs ice cars, electric cars can also end up consuming "dirty" electricity from coal fired plants, but that's an option vs. ice cars.

Could the concept of proof-of-work be extended to prove that work was done cleanly, ie: using only renewable electricity rather than that produced from fossil fuels?

Perhaps renewable electricity producers could issue some sort of signed token which is then incorporated into the blockchain as proof that renewable electricity was purchased?

A digital signature can never prove anything about the world. And this doesn’t change by putting it in a blockchain.

You've now introduced a set of trusted entities validating something for consensus. Why bother with proof of work at that point? You only need it because you can't agree on a trusted subset of participants with the rest of the network.

If we had a way to do this, why would we just limit it to crypto?

I translate PoW as Proof of Waste.

This is a great comment paul_f, keep it up. You're adding a lot of value on HN.

What is ethically wrong with using electricity? Or have you skipped a few steps in your argument?

There are serious environmental concerns being raised about the amount of electricity being used to mine Bitcoin (see, e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27135776). My comment does assume that less electricity use is good, because that's the context in which Ethereum posted this.

I'm mining crypto (very small amounts) as I as I type this, so I'm definitely not going to make the case that all crypto mining is an immoral waste of electricity. But I remain very interested in transition to a PoS system, so as to reduce the strain of crypto on the environment.

All human economic activity that uses electricity should be judged by the same standard then. I think the unstated premise of most of these arguments is that crypto provides no meaningful economic benefit to society, and thus the use of real resources (that sometimes produces pollution as a byproduct, depending on the source) is immoral.

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