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For blockchains using proof-of-work you need two things: 1) The work has to be very hard to do (and quantifiably so), but very easy to verify. 2) The block's
by DennisP 3y ago
For blockchains using proof-of-work you need two things:
1) The work has to be very hard to do (and quantifiably so), but very easy to verify.
2) The block's transactions have to be an input to the computation, and it has to be impossible to get the same output with a modified set of transactions.
Cryptographic hash functions fulfill both of these requirements. Almost nothing else does.
However, if blockchains switch to proof-of-stake, then the GPUs previously dedicated to that blockchain are available for other purposes. But the biggest GPU-based blockchain already did that, and Bitcoin uses specialized hardware that can't do anything other than Bitcoin's hash function.