Recent thread on exactly this question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15074139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15074139 I liked my answer and some

Recent thread on exactly this question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15074139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15074139 I liked my answer and some other people's answers there. Edit: something apparently not mentioned in the other thread is the way current cryptocurrencies consume enormous amounts of power. While this power is used for a useful purpose in some sense, the economics of Bitcoin hardware in particular haven't produced the kind of decentralization of mining that the original paper seems to foresee, yet there has been an incentive to use tons of energy. So, it would also be great to see cryptocurrencies find a way to do proof-of-work that achieves greater decentralization with significantly less energy cost. (There is of course active research on this and I wouldn't regard it as impossible, but many people see the energy issue as an extremely disturbing source of waste.)