> Neither of those ways are how anyone describes proof of work. Argument from silence. Your explanations are, of course, correct. You are just approaching thi

> Neither of those ways are how anyone describes proof of work. Argument from silence. Your explanations are, of course, correct. You are just approaching this differently than he. Given a system with mechanisms that work according to your explanations, we can also describe the system in terms of economics and game theory (and possibly gain some extra insight). This is what Vitalik is doing. Specifically, in the first way, he's saying that PoW can be seen as a game that rewards participant votes toward a majority vote that hopes to align with a schelling point, ie, schellingcoin. Here, participants vote with their mining power, and those that vote with the majority are rewarded, while everyone else gets nothing. In the second way, he's saying the PoW is a market between tokens and resources, which can be measured in total computational power. > it has nothing to do with currency. PoW does to do with currency, in practice, because participating has a real cost; miners are trading some resources, electricity and computational power, for tokens as part of what could be described as a schellingcoin mechanism. If there was no currency involved, no reward for 'correctly' participating, no 'market' for trading computation for currency, I'd assume that no work would actually ever be done by rational actors. Looking at these incentives of the system, looking from an economic and game theoretic perspective, can help us gain insight about how these systems perform in the real world of limited resources and competing ideologies and actors. This field is being called "cryptoeconomics". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lw3s7iGUXQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lw3s7iGUXQ