[curuinor]

it's as old as android with like 5 orders of magnitude less societal impact and worse societal impact when there is societal impact than android. it's eaten a material amount of all gains in renewable energy basically using cycles to heat the world for what ends up being an O(n) database insert.

[glenvdb]

Database insert? Ok...

You may benefit from reading about why Bitcoin works the way that it does, and why certain tradeoffs were made.

But you don't really care to know, do you?

[curuinor]

I did do the reading. It's an O(n) db insert. The blockchain's the DB and the insert needs PoW.

throughput of a blockchain is contingent upon tweaking but for the original bitcoin, still used, it's 6 mb/hour. electricity consumption is 14 gigawatts. if i were given 14 gigawatts of electricity i think i could do better than 6 megabytes/hour.

[glenvdb]

Do you understand the tradeoffs of why it works that way?

That for an open and fully accessible, decentralised system that exists in an adversarial environment there has to be a large cost to any attacks?

Of course there are much more efficient ways to store data, but those are centralised and vulnerable to the problems of centralisation. The blockchain's and proof-of-work's purpose is to be decentralised.

[curuinor]

right. everything is a tradeoff. but in almost every other part of the tradeoff space you can do better than 6 mb/hour for 14 gigawatts.