“Work” doesn’t have to be wasteful. It could be based on the number of pieces of litter that were collected, the number of meals to the homeless that were served. It’s just easier to measure when work is something wasteful.
If BTC mining relied on pieces of litter being collected you'd get people spending $millions on factories to produce litter and vehicles to distribute it just so more could be collected. That sounds crazy to type out, but it's no stranger than the situation we currently find ourselves in. The most advanced tools man has ever created are being used to create chips with no practical value, but that are good for converting energy into tokens through pointless calculations.
I don't believe it is possible to create a proof of work system that is not a "proof of waste" once the reward is high.
Spare CPU cycles felt like a waste, that becomes dedicated processing, that becomes dedicated hardware, that eventually became designing custom hardware.
Kim Stanley Robinson proposes this in his recent novel, The Ministry for the Future. He mostly skips the details around how it would actually work though, beyond needing an enormous amount of human labor for verification. In real life, that would break the decentralization of it.
If BTC mining relied on pieces of litter being collected you'd get people spending $millions on factories to produce litter and vehicles to distribute it just so more could be collected. That sounds crazy to type out, but it's no stranger than the situation we currently find ourselves in. The most advanced tools man has ever created are being used to create chips with no practical value, but that are good for converting energy into tokens through pointless calculations.
I don't believe it is possible to create a proof of work system that is not a "proof of waste" once the reward is high.
Spare CPU cycles felt like a waste, that becomes dedicated processing, that becomes dedicated hardware, that eventually became designing custom hardware.