[K0balt]

POW doesn’t have to be useless work. It can be useful work, so that mining actually creates a value tied to off chain economic systems. Then you have something that actually has value, and you can then use POS to give validators both a correct incentive alignment and a way to get paid for their work. Hybrid value backed POW for token creation with POS for validation creates a really good system for digital assets.

Sadly, extant systems for this are few because generating real value is actually challenging.

[cyberax]

> It can be useful work

It can be in theory, but in practice there are no tasks that fit the definition. All attempts to use something like protein folding ended up in failure.

[K0balt]

>no tasks….

Umm, I don’t think that’s true at all.

Digital content platform, for example, is a perfect task to generate outside value. Data storage is another example with many chains in that category thriving. Database is another, gpu compute/render, lots of useful tasks. You are basically saying that computational resources cannot be used to do valuable work, which is a premise that I think is questionable at best.

You don’t see a lot of hype around these projects because they aren’t intended to be speculative- teams in this space try to avoid wild speculation driven value cycles, because it is damaging to their economic models.

[cyberax]

> Digital content platform, for example, is a perfect task to generate outside value.

Yep. Storing CSAM materials against your will is great. Maybe interspersed with pirated movies. To add insult to injury, it's also not reliable enough for archival purposes for important data.

So far, I haven't seen any actually useful proof-of-work schemes that truly benefit the society.