the protocol can function without the massive power use
At scale no, it can’t and that’ll never be the case because at any given time, someone will be willing to put more energy (work) into it to gain an advantage - so as long as there’s demand for that coin, PoW will always demand huge amounts of energy.
And yes, I do blame the consensus protocol because ultimately that’s the culprit of causing this incentive to waste energy and targeting miners or any other actors is an utter waste of time.
meaning PoW is not such a problem when applied to create consensus in local or niche blockchains as the difficulty (and energy consumption) is orders of magnitude lower. For widely used coins it’s a terrible choice.
I never said there’s a problem with the protocol - that’s indeed, working as intended. There IS a problem of using the protocol (at scale) though, because it creates this unsustainable environment.
As another comment put it: PoW is the coal burning of this era.
Using it for your bbq is no big deal. Using it to generate energy for half the world is awful.
At scale no, it can’t and that’ll never be the case because at any given time, someone will be willing to put more energy (work) into it to gain an advantage - so as long as there’s demand for that coin, PoW will always demand huge amounts of energy.
And yes, I do blame the consensus protocol because ultimately that’s the culprit of causing this incentive to waste energy and targeting miners or any other actors is an utter waste of time.
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meaning PoW is not such a problem when applied to create consensus in local or niche blockchains as the difficulty (and energy consumption) is orders of magnitude lower. For widely used coins it’s a terrible choice.
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I never said there’s a problem with the protocol - that’s indeed, working as intended. There IS a problem of using the protocol (at scale) though, because it creates this unsustainable environment.
As another comment put it: PoW is the coal burning of this era.
Using it for your bbq is no big deal. Using it to generate energy for half the world is awful.
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And there’s no way to use it so that it doesn’t consume huge amounts of energy because of greed and because of how computers work.
So very much a problem of using PoW.
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