[sph]

Capital (stake) can be accumulated infinitely, without friction, and usually the more you have the more its value accelerates upwards.

Work can be increased, certainly, but you pretty much hit major physical blocks to its increase, whether it’s productivity, lack of capital, energy costs, competition finding new ways to do the same work for less cost.

Really, the parallels to real world wealth disparity are reflected in why proof-of-stake is just a bad idea, unless you are one of the “1%” of crypto mining, then you just have to sit and wait for your stake to increase indefinitely. Then why not lend it for interest? You can get it to grow even faster. Whoops, we have reinvented the global economy and the wealth disparity.

[D13Fd]

With proof-of-work, we as a society are doing insane things like burning large amounts of fossil fuels on a warming planet just to ensure people don’t cheat at various distributed spreadsheets. Even if you don’t participate in crypto, those who do are polluting your environment, increasing your electricity costs, and generally making the planet worse all to run their distributed spreadsheets

With proof-of-stake, all of the annoying crypto folk are basically harmless. They generate near zero economic value (moving money from place to place, which can be accomplished without crypto) but they don’t hurt anybody except for other crypto folk.

[kingstnap]

Proof of Work provides scarcity that makes crypto work. Stake just removes the physical scarcity so it fundamentally can't work.

I think proof of storage or something would be more interesting as a (partial) solution to the crypto folk wasting electricity.

Ideally as proof of RAM though. We don't want them abusing cloud storage plans.

[everfree]

> Stake just removes the physical scarcity so it fundamentally can't work.

Why is scarcity required to be physical? And if it fundamentally can't work, why does it seem to be working by the metrics?

[D13Fd]

The reality is, if crypto requires a proof of work system that burns energy for nothing, it’s not a system we as a society should be using.

[sph]

> we as a society are doing insane things like burning large amounts of fossil fuels

Period. Shutting down Bitcoin won't solve global warming, and Bitcoin doesn't require fossil fuels necessarily to run. This is a tired argument that blames the ills of the world on one thing that you don't particularly like or see the benefit of. Bitcoin just likes abundant, cheap energy just like everything else in our modern world.

Technological societies require increasing amounts of energy. The issue is that fossil fuels are easier to generate electricity out of, favoured by governments, lobbies and voters alike, so renewables are more expensive. If your issue is burning large amounts of fossil fuels, you should work on this problem rather than complaining about one user downstream of the problem. It's easy to point the finger because it's easy to calculate how much energy bitcoin uses (transactions per day * energy per transaction), so it's easy to make a one-line viral tweet blaming all the ills of the world on it, while there are much more wasteful businesses whose energy usage is hard to quantify that everyone conveniently ignores.

It is so tiring to have to explain this every time on every HN thread, but I guess it's always so easy to convince oneself there is a simple solution to very hard problems. "Just shut Bitcoin down, I don't see a use for it so it's useless."

[D13Fd]

A proof-of-work system intentionally wastes energy as a means of doing a distributed spreadsheet. That's it.

When you use scale that spreadsheet to track currency, a proof-of-work system wastes massive amounts of energy, by design, all to keep the distributed spreadsheet honest.

Energy is scarce and expensive. Wasting huge amounts of it for a proof-of-work crypto systems drives up the cost of electricity for everyone.

Beyond that, all electricity generation has negative external effects, including carbon release, pollution, or even just wasting space. We are all impacted by those effects. It doesn't matter if the proof-of-work system uses "green" electricity, it's still intentionally wasting massive amounts of electricity and other resources that could be used elsewhere, all just to change values on a spreadsheet.

[mattwilsonn888]

If you cannot describe a way to update a spread sheet with equal security as scaled PoW then your premise that it 'wastes' energy is unfounded.

[proxynoproxy]

And just to think of the energy that you wasted arguing this tired point! It’s about trust.

You don’t see it has value because you trust in authority. For those that don’t trust in authority, they need a proof of work to prove that someone else… did the work. Dont trust, verify.

That no-trust, verify model is valuable to me. It’s a one way valve. Super useful when you can’t trust anyone around you.

Bitcoin is money for enemies. If my enemy and I can transact in an adversarial environment without relying on some subjective truth, this is valuable.

[munksbeer]

> Bitcoin is money for enemies. If my enemy and I can transact in an adversarial environment without relying on some subjective truth, this is valuable.

What are you transacting? Ultimately, you're going to be transacting in a real world "thing", rather than just something on the chain. So you haven't actually solved anything, there is still a layer of trust involved. You still rely on your enemy to either make the transaction after you deliver the "thing", or you rely on your enemy to deliver the "thing" after you make the transaction.

Sure, you can stand there with guns to heads, but then you could just do it in cash, no need for bitcoin.

[mattwilsonn888]

You should appreciate that the trust assumptions in your example have been minimized to a point not before possible for digital transactions; in principle removing all possible third-party interference in remote transactions.

If you're going to argue about failures in practice, I'm not interested, because I agree (likely in a way more open-minded to moving forward than your mindset of giving up).

[munksbeer]

> It is so tiring to have to explain this every time on every HN thread, but I guess it's always so easy to convince oneself there is a simple solution to very hard problems. "Just shut Bitcoin down, I don't see a use for it so it's useless."

It must feel tiring to you, because you're at an impasse. You clearly believe what you believe, but that doesn't mean you are correct. You could consider, you could be completely incorrect, and wasting enormous amounts of energy on a concept that achieves almost nothing.

Put it this way, if bitcoin disappeared tomorrow, the world wouldn't stutter, it wouldn't even blink. "The unbanked" argument is largely bunkum, a few anecdotes thrown together to create a moral for the bitcoin narrative.

But in the end, it could disappear, and nothing of value would have been lost.

So, there are a small subset of people (like yourself) who value bitcoin. The rest don't. When you look at it from their perspective, it is easy to see why they think burning huge amounts of energy every day for nothing is a waste. An enormous waste.

PS. For what it is worth, I am a long term bitcoin holder (well, since 2017, still relatively late). I wait for the day when I can cash out to retire in style, and I sincerely hope that people keep pretending that it is worth something other than to sell it to the next person for more fiat money.

[proxynoproxy]

“I hate TikTok and all those ByteDance Data Centers must be shut down because it’s a waste and I don’t like it”.