[kumarvvr]

While I agree politically with the idea of a distributed ledger, this implementation (and I am sure a lot of thought has gone into design of distributed ledgers) of making computational complexity as a pre-condition to participate in the ledger is rightfully criticized. The world, overall does not benefit from using the blockchain, in any form, just for the energy consumed.

[awill88]

How else could you verify the ledger without computational power without the reliance on an authority? This is assuming that we are philosophically considering authority as undesirable for ledgers.. like I get it, proof of work at this point is kind of BS in the sense that it’s not accessible for the individual so it loses all its novelty in the libertarian sense.. energy just feels like a problem that is solved elsewhere, I don’t think we should be calling it wasteful if humanity is on the brink of fusion and newer cleaner sources of energy.. I dunno, scrutinizing energy consumption just seems like an easy target, too easy, like lazy.

[dredmorbius]

Maybe some reliance on authority is a good thing?

Because the answer crytpocurrency provides to "how much are you willing to pay to never have to trust anyone" is "one hell of a lot" via work-factor.

A fundamental characteristic of all exchange systems is trust. That may not be institutional trust, but there is trust in something: mineral scarcity and assayability, counterparty, commodity-currency acceptability by others, pricing and exchange systems, recourse options, etc.

In economics, there's a long observation that high-trust markets and the societies in which they exist perform vastly better than low-trust ones. And interestingly, cryptocurrency fairly neatly segregates markets into those who do have fundamental trust in institutions and practices, and those who do not.

[mmmeff]

Iota