3 ms·
You severely underestimate the power use of proof-of-work blockchains. It's on the scale of nations. But the main difference is that whatever you compare with
by cedilla 5y ago
You severely underestimate the power use of proof-of-work blockchains. It's on the scale of nations.
But the main difference is that whatever you compare with those blockchains, it will never have the critical flaw: the automatically increasing difficulty. Your dryer doesn't periodically flood the drum to make it harder because more people are interested in tumble drying.
- jhasse 5y agoDifficulty isn't necessarely increasing. It could also decrease if less people are interested in mining (e.g. when energy prices go up).
- newbie789 5y ago
- cedilla 5y agoThat is true. However, market forces guarantee that the difficulty will go up to the point where it's infeasible to add more hashrate, e.g. because it becomes uneconomical or there's simply no more hardware available. PoW workchains must work at maximum inefficiency. (This bears out in the data, too, I think. BTC had its highest hashrate at the beginning of this month, when energy price were at an all-time high and BTC was at the lowest over 12 months)