[tachyonbeam]

I'm not sure where this is going. Doesn't the computational cost to mine ether bitcoin or ether change over time?

And also, we already have units for quantifying computation. We can talk about millions/trillions of floating-point operations and also millions/trillions of instructions executed. The problem is that it's very hard to reach the peak theoretical capacity of a system, and also, when you're talking about trillions of instructions, the time taken depends on your instruction makeup.

You'd get a similar problem if you talked about ether as a computational unit, because a machine can be designed to mine ether really fast, but not be suitable/optimized for other types of computation, meaning that the compute power it takes your system to compute an ether might not be a good way to quantify the time it would take said system to compute something else.

[merwanedr]

The idea is to use Ether as a unified and simple unit for computation cost in a sense that it can become a recognizable metric. Just like instinctively thinking "this is cheap" when you see something priced at $0.01, you could think "I can run this" when you see something priced at 0.0001ETH.