> Let's be real, the anti-cryptocurrency arguments are something like this: It eats to much energy so we should ban it (just like gaming! Oh wait...) The real

> Let's be real, the anti-cryptocurrency arguments are something like this: It eats to much energy so we should ban it (just like gaming! Oh wait...) The real argument is a bit more subtle: with gaming (and most other uses of power), the incentive is to lower the power usage for a given level of functionality. With cryptocurrency, the incentives are to increase the power usage. The idea behind PoW is to make it too costly (and a large part of the cost is power usage) to find an alternative longer chain. And for an individual miner, the incentive is to use more power than the competition, so that a larger fraction of the fixed amount of reward goes to that miner.