Proof of work sucks, if the "work" is just running the same hash function over and over and wasting electricity. At Qbix, back in 2018 we were the first ones t

Proof of work sucks, if the "work" is just running the same hash function over and over and wasting electricity. At Qbix, back in 2018 we were the first ones to implement Monero mining as an option to pay for an Calendars app that was on 50,000 computers, instead of a monthly recurring fee. But we quickly took it out. Back then it blew up and was all over the news, while I was finally taking a week vacation on a cruise with bad internet LOL: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43386918 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43386918 https://venturebeat.com/security/mac-app-calendar-2-misfires-on-cryptocurrency-mining-vanishes-from-app-store/ https://venturebeat.com/security/mac-app-calendar-2-misfires... https://mashable.com/article/apple-app-mining-cryptocurrency https://mashable.com/article/apple-app-mining-cryptocurrency https://www.newsweek.com/apple-your-mac-mining-cryptocurrency-app-store-caught-hosting-suspect-software-842663 https://www.newsweek.com/apple-your-mac-mining-cryptocurrenc... https://www.engadget.com/2018-03-13-apple-calendar-2-crypto-miner.html https://www.engadget.com/2018-03-13-apple-calendar-2-crypto-... https://9to5mac.com/2018/03/13/crypto-mining-calendar-app-ios/ https://9to5mac.com/2018/03/13/crypto-mining-calendar-app-io... The original article was from ArsTechnica, who interviewed me: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/theres-a-currency-miner-in-the-mac-app-store-and-apple-seems-ok-with-it/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/there... I told them: "We have decided to REMOVE the miner in the app. The next version will remove the option to get free features via mining. This is for three reasons: 1) The company which provided us the miner library did not disclose its source code, and it would take too long for them to fix the root cause of the CPU issue. 2) The rollout had a perfect storm of bugs which made it seem like our company wanted* to mine crypto-currency without people's permission, and that goes against our whole ethos and vision for Qbix. 3) My own personal feeling that Proof of Work has a dangerous set of incentives which can lead to electricity waste on a global scale we've never seen before. We don't want to get sucked into this set of incentives, and hopefully our decision to ultimately remove the miner will set some sort of precedent for other apps as well. Ultimately, even though we technically could have remedied the situation and continued on benefiting from the pretty large income such a miner generates, we took the above as a sign that we should get out of the "mining business" before we get sucked into the Proof of Work morass of incentives."*