[mondoveneziano]

> The stake/spacetime/electricity isn't wasted; it is used to establish global consensus.

I still would like everyone to understand how proof-of-work really works, I don't think many people do.

The current Bitcoin hash rate means that all those miners are currently calculating on the order of 100.000.000.000.000.000.000 hashes per second.

Of those, in Bitcoin only around 6 per hour have any actual effect. Six. Those are the ones that met the arbitrary target. The other 10^20 did not do any actual work, meaning that none of them did bring any miner, not even the same miner, the same chip, closer to the "answer". In that sense, they are wasted.

Instead, it is literally a lottery. The difficulty is adjusted such that if you try 100.000.000.000.000.000.000 random numbers per second, 6 per hour will randomly hit the target. It's more "raffling" that "mining".

[jtsiskin]

I’m not sure I see what you’re saying. The “arbitrary target” is so high because of all the mining. If there were less miners, the difficult would decrease, and then it would be easier for a malicious party to find one of those 6 lottery tickets.

[mondoveneziano]

I am simply explaining how proof-of-work works.

It is correct that the difficulty is adjusted based on the hash rate. If mining power was halved, it would become twice as easy to hit the target. If a new ASIC would make calculating hashes twice as efficient, the network would make hitting the target twice as difficult, effectively counteracting the efficiency. The goal is to always have 6 successful calculations per hour on average.

[quantified]

I really like the characterization as a lottery, it is just luck. Your odds of winning each “next” are weighted by your ops/sec, but nothing better.