[belltaco]

I feel this is the wrong comparison. PoW intentionally raises the difficulty by making computer do more "work" finding useless hashes as the price of crypto goes up. The "work" isn't used for processing transactions, which is why the number of transactions per second is stuck at a pitiful 7 transactions per second for BTC, and 15 for ETH. Programming languages don't have a mechanism where Ruby, PHP or Python have features to intentionally burn more CPU cycles in order to accomplish their objective of making programming easier.

[hetspookjee]

I agree that the raising of difficulty is problematic. But is it not that running arbitrary javascript in advertisements, and the ever growing scale of said javascript chunked in, is also growing ever more? You state indeed that it's a mere 7 transactions per second, yet I'm settling transactions over 2nd layer networks like Lightning and Liquid. Javascript advertisements bring me nothing but distraction and a settled state of mind. I find this a far bigger harm than commodotizing international transactions, how slow they might be.

[hocuspocus]

I'm gonna skip the obvious whataboutism of your argument, but your 2nd layer networks have just re-invented centralization of federated and trusted peers, congrats.

International settlements aren't a technological problem. SWIFT has been commoditizing international transactions for many decades. When there's still friction, it exists by design. International transfers are pretty fast and cheap between countries that agree on the same rules and regulations regarding capital flows.

Sure you can use Bitcoin to avoid these regulations. But most people and businesses aren't actually interested in illegal ways to move money.

[derangedHorse]

Increasing the hash power makes the blockchain more secure by raising the amount of work that has gone into it and making it harder to falsify. Also the “work” not being used to process transactions isn’t “why” the transaction rate is 7 tps, the tps is kept lower to keep blocksizes lower and allow more participation from the community since smaller blockchain are more accessible for download (for total verification)