I would love to hear an explanation of how PoST consumes natural resources and produces e-waste as compared to PoW.
In both systems, total cost of mining approaches the block reward. For example, if block rewards are $10 million a day, then $10 million worth of energy is used in PoW. PoST burns through $10 million worth of hard drives.
The cost of PoST is based on scarcity in hard drives, which incentivizes production of hard drives. The cost of PoW is based on scarcity in energy, which incentivizes production of cheap and clean energy.
Where do you get the 'clean' from?
Usually the cheapest sources are also far away from people, because any local demand will increase energy price. However, when renewables near people have overcapacity, Bitcoin miners can serve as a buyer of last resort. This way, investments in renewables become more profitable.
[0] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/07/renewables-cheapest-e...
We can definitely agree that crypto's demand for electricity basically doesn't care about location. So it puts a floor of demand for electricity generation in remote places. (Also in more accessible places. But there it's relatively less important.)
Electricity is both fungible to an extent, but also not as globally traded as eg wheat or oil.
You are right that on the margin Bitcoin makes generation of renewable electricity more profitable. But it also makes all other electricity generation more profitable, on the margin.
Let's see how this develops.
I'm failing to follow how PoW is fundamentally different than PoST in terms of hardware (and the resources to produce it) necessary to validate blocks.
It seems that the point of PoST is that we get a similar potential of decentralization that we get with PoW with significantly less energy usage.
I somewhat understand the argument of PoW incentivizing production of cheap and clean energy and I hope this is realized ... specifically clean energy, specifically advanced nuclear as its utilization isn't geographically restricted.
The competition has shifted into finding cheaper energy sources, rather than developing more energy efficient ASICs. There's a clear trend in this direction.