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Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

I will welcome it when it does, don't get me wrong. That honestly removes a major issue I have with cryptocurrency (at least with Ether, anyway). There are a host of more theoretical reasons I'm not buying into the ecosystem, but remove that negative externality and hey - you do you, not my bag but you aren't hurting others.

I'm sure it is closer than ever, if it wasn't then there's something wrong with the development process! I sincerely wish the various people involved good luck in this venture and a speedy success in moving it to production. In the mean time I'm still going to get pissed off at people saying that energy concerns are outdated, especially when they're referring to the whole cryptocurrency ecosystem.

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Don't forget that traditional banks consume lots of energy as well. Their armies of employees and tellers are required to drive an hour or so every day, they maintain tons of physical buildings, truck around piles of physical currency etc. Traditional fiat is given legitimacy based on government's monopoly on violence inside their borders which often result in wars. Nothing is free and I'm fairly certain that crypto will end in less energy consumption, not more.

Exactly. Proof of work is costly in energy and affordable in labor. The energy consumption of labor-intensive industries obfuscates the real energy requirements of those industries, by effectively outsourcing the energy consumption to the workers.

I still prefer Ethereum's variation of Proof of Stake over Proof of Work, but it's by no means clear to me that Proof of Work based blockchains are less resource-efficient than traditional financial systems, and I would wager a comprehensive analysis would show in fact that they have the potential to be vastly more efficient, if they're allowed to scale up their transaction throughput to amortize their energy consumption across more numerous transactions.

Proof of work does not replace labour though. There is not really an equivalent outlay in tradtional banking. And blockchains don't provide the services that the labor provides in the banking sector.

This is just more nonsense.

Proof of work completely replaces the bureaucracy that maintains trust in traditional ledgers..

A bunch of automated nodes, strewn across the globe, and connected via the internet, maintain the network, with the network being able to seamlessly/autonomously manage nodes joining/leaving.

There are no legal contracts that need to be drawn up, filled out and signed for someone to start submitting PoW, or validating and propagating transactions, to the network. There is no HR department. No payroll. Just machines, and a deterministic compensation mechanism, managed by a fault tolerant network of machines.

> Don't forget that traditional banks consume lots of energy as well.

This is a spurious comparison, traditional banks provide orders of magnitude more services to orders of magnitude more people.

> Nothing is free and I'm fairly certain that crypto will end in less energy consumption, not more.

One day, could, will.

But still isn't and doesn't. With a background of a world scrambling for cleaner power to mitigate climate change. That's the problem.

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