> But that doesn't mean there's zero net benefit. The benefit is a permissionless network that no one can control unless they produce more computation than the

> But that doesn't mean there's zero net benefit. The benefit is a permissionless network that no one can control unless they produce more computation than the rest of the network. So, the benefit of each miner coming on is raising the attack threshold and increasing your confidence that it won't be attacked. Hypothetical scenario: a hardfork of Bitcoin is developed that maintains all of these wonderful properties — impossible for any one party to control, bypasses financial choke points, impossible to censor — but requires orders of magnitude less energy. It utilizes a variety of clever mechanisms to achieve the same goals without using Proof of Work calculations to secure the network. This sort of thing is what the exactly what the MIT team in the article is attempting to accomplish, it's not an intractable problem. Would you support switching over to the new fork? I would. It does all the things I like about Bitcoin without this big carbon footprint. No downside. But do you know who will never support the fork? Bitcoin miners. They've invested millions in custom hardware to let them process proofs of work as quickly as possible. They have a massive economic incentive to continue to use PoW. Forever. Even if there exists a better way. Maybe in this world the price of BTC would go down as people moved to alternatives. I'd like to think people would be ashamed to use an unnecessarily inefficient currency. But when I hear Bitcoin advocates dismiss environmental concerns as irrelevant or shift the blame onto government tax policy, it doesn't make me terribly optimistic.