[mikeash]

That doesn’t make any sense. The cost of a particular PoW can vary enormously. Mining a Bitcoin block in Hawaii using a CPU will cost orders of magnitude more than doing it in Iceland with an ASIC, but they are treated identically in the network. It’s proof of work. It just so happens that work costs money.

[Semirhage]

It should be Proof or Waste, or Proof of Heat/Entropy. The work being done is difficult, yet trivial and only valuable because it yields coins. Miners convert free energy into heat, for funny money, and it doesn’t scale well. Sure, maybe PoS could work (I doubt it) and maybe renewables could be the future of mining. Unfortunately we’re stuck with a majority of miners burning coal in China to show off the required volume of entropy to cash in.

When this fad dies, it will have been historically significant in terms of pure waste.

[mikeash]

Yes, it’s really unfortunate that bitcoin doesn’t use a PoW that performs useful computations as a side effect.