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> Yelling about electricity costs and how "trust is needed!" is getting old It's still a valid concern, Pow has currently lots of difficulty to scale because o
by realusername 9y ago
> Yelling about electricity costs and how "trust is needed!" is getting old
It's still a valid concern, Pow has currently lots of difficulty to scale because of that, not to mention that the electricity needed is enormous to sustain the system.
- smallnamespace 9y agoPoW is a way to use computation as a substitute for human-based methods of generating truth. I wonder how much electricity, energy, and emissions are represented by salaries for the lawyers and judges that are the current implementation of distributed social trust?
- clarkmoody 9y agoYou have your causal chain reversed: enormous amounts of electricity are spent on proof-of-work because it is profitable. There is no minimum amount of work required to "sustain" the system. Of course you lose security with less work performed, but the system can be sustained.
- realusername 9y agoYeah of course but if you want Bitcoin to be used by everybody (that's the goal of a currency after all), it becomes thus very profitable to mine and therefore an enormous amount of electricity is used. That's what I meant by a scaling issue, it works as long as there's not too many users.
- hndamien 9y agoThe energy cost of mining gold is proportional to the price of gold.
- moomin 9y agoWhen discussing environmental damage, I’m not sure gold is the thing you want to be comparing to.
- hndamien 9y agoJust making a point about the economics. The environmental destruction is caused by the energy production in the case of Bitcoin mining. In the case of gold mining, it is done by the mining.