[buckie]

There is an example of directly scaling PoW that's been in prod for 1.5 years now: https://explorer.chainweb.com/mainnet

Instead of having X PH of PoW difficulty for a single blockchain, you have N parallel blockchains with ~X/N PH difficulty. Same energy needs, N*single chain performance. The coolest bit being that N can increase in an upgrade w/o needing to increase energy consumption, should the network gain traction and need more throughput. It upgraded from 10 to 20 chains last summer.

Other cool bit is that each chain runs a formally verifiable LISP (Pact)... I jokingly refer to Kadena as "a multithreaded LISP machine in the sky".

Disclaimer: I designed the Chainweb consensus algorithm