[crispyambulance]

I admit I don't know much of anything about cryptocurrency, but is there something fundamental about the need for "mining" (in whatever form) for currency? It seems like the intent behind bitcoin mining was to mimic the scarcity of mining for gold or other precious metals by substituting hefty computations. But isn't that just a means of getting the currency bootstrapped in some way which ensures that it becomes scarce? Aren't there other, less energy intensive ways to do that?

I mean, could there not be a cryptocurrency which bootstrapped off of the exchange with "real currency"? Or perhaps by direct exchange of goods and services?

[sp332]

There's more to mining than this, but one aspect is that it protects the network from attack. If there's a disagreement about whether a transaction was made, the side with more computing power wins. There's no central authority to arbitrate disputes, so they continuously have to prove which transactions are acknowledged by the majority. If they turned down the hash power to a reasonable level, someone with more hash power could come along and start rewriting transaction history.

[lytedev]

Unfortunately I believe one of the core concepts is the "proof-of-work" and Bitcoin cannot work on the decentralized and distributed manner it achieves without it.

[brohee]

We should really rename "proof-of-work" as proof-of-waste, as it is what it is, frankly...

[wyldfire]

What does the word 'waste' mean to you? Why would you use this word to describe what is done by the proof of work?

If you think cryptocoins have no utility, then it stands to reason that the proof of work is wasteful. And beyond: the time and money spent by developers, corporations, exchanges, etc: all waste.

But if you think that cryptocoins do have some utility, then it seems unfair to call it a "proof-of-waste". The PoW is the only way to equitably mint new currency.

[crispyambulance]

    > The PoW is the only way to equitably mint new currency.

I think this statement needs some proof.

Why can't exchange of goods or services substitute for proof of work?

Why does proof of work _have_ to be power-hungry number crunching?

[wyldfire]

I thought it was implicit from context but I should have included "...[for a decentralized] currency."

I should have made it explicit that I meant "trustless + equitable" with respect to minting new currency.

> Why can't exchange of goods or services substitute for proof of work?

'exchange of goods or services' can't be used to mint new currency. When you want to issue new money, you have to give it to someone. If you take goods or services, who should get those? Let's say you come up with a method to solve that, equitably. How could you prove to everyone who got those, and how could they trust your claim?

> Why does proof of work _have_ to be power-hungry number crunching?

It might not have to be number crunching (I didn't say it did), it just happens to be the most popular. However I think that 'Work' here is the physics sense of the word -- the proof-of-work is evidence that you consumed energy.

Another mechanism is to just delete the "trustless" requirement. Just issue the currency via some trust-the-individual(s)-who-created-the-coin mechanism, like some DPoS coins do (e.g. Nano). They can use a fountain with a CAPTCHA, and we have to trust that the fountain is indeed fair. This coin is popular for the sake that it does not require PoW for minting and has no inflation.

[s73v3r_]

"What does the word 'waste' mean to you? Why would you use this word to describe what is done by the proof of work?"

Because it's a waste. It's not worth what it costs to do, and it's making our world worse by eating up more resources.

[wyldfire]

> It's not worth what it costs to do

If you concede that it has utility at all, then all you're saying is "I wouldn't be willing to pay that much". But clearly the market will bear a higher price than you're willing to pay.

Other things that are proof of waste: 1k USD iPhones, Cartoons on TV, all-you-care-to-eat restaurants, dabbing, hoverboards.

[s73v3r_]

I'm seeing a whole lot of "whataboutism", but I'm not seeing anything relevant to the current conversation.

[ehrtt]

Not worth it to you. Just like your trip to Thailand is a waste of finite resources as far as I'm concerned. Who gets to decide, these things are subjective. That's why we use markets to allocate resources.

[s73v3r_]

Except you don't exist in a vacuum.

[wanderfowl]

I understand that a central respository of work and the need to make the busywork scale cleanly and linearly makes it tough to be decentralized, but I regularly wish that a dominant cryptocurrency could find a way to do proof of (real) work with these cycles. There are so many projects which just lack for computing power (e.g. folding, prime hunting, etc), so it feels like even more of a waste to turning real power into arbitrary hashes.