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Comment by rland | Hacker News Reader

The difference, though, is that the proof of work is qualitatively — physically! — a different type of work.

The value of money is derived from moving against thermodynamic equilibrium. Cryptocurrency’s value comes from moving towards thermodynamic equilibrium. The conversion of work into heat — not heat into work!

I’m not talking about taxation or apps. Those are things built with the axioms of crypto-evangelism. I’m talking about the physical fundamentals underlying those axioms.

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Burning electrical power is the most globally available version of burning universal value.

The thermodynamic direction is less important than the fact that people didn't want to do it.

But proof of work was always a transitory, bootstrapping phase. Even among the crypto evangelists, I can't believe anyone saw a long-term future in that.

Slinging double SHA256 til the heat death of the universe is my long term vision. POW as a bootstrap phase is ethereum pos wishful nonsense. Many see the long term future of PoW. Many believe it is the only way.

In your view, what's the long term solution between environmental efficiency vs attack resistance? The two seem mutually-exclusive in PoW.

Solar, geothermal, wind and nuclear power? Using energy doesn’t destroy the environment. Producing energy uncleanly does. Shouting at children using PlayStations or miners producing hashes doesn’t make the environment any better. Shouting at the coal lobby might.

Color me skeptical. The cost-security tradeoff of PoW fundamentally relies on using more energy until it becomes expensive (relative to crypto revenue). If energy is cheap ("), someone will consume additional capacity.

Solar, geothermal, wind, nuclear et al. are cleaner (from an energy production standpoint, and mostly from a generator production standpoint), but still have fundamental capacity limits.

"We're going to burn {currentWorldPower}+1, forever" isn't a viable end state.

We will use more and more energy every year as our species evolves. It is the trajectory of every civilization to generate and harness more energy. Cryptocurrency will use more and more energy, and we will seek out new ways to generate it. It is the drumbeat of human progress.

Building oligarchical proof of stake ponzi games is not progress. That is when we have given up and just want to stagnate.

The fact that we will scale energy usage does not make the scaling factor irrelevant.

Increasing at 1.5x vs 2x has very different implications for the planet, economy, and international politics.

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