Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by throwaway290 380 days ago
PoW is supported by two things, belief that waste of energy is valuable and criminals using it to workaround sanctions.
1 comments

It’s more that waste energy allows one way process, which is valuable. Valves. Diodes. One doesn’t complain about waste heat from computation in general, if that computation has value.

And the second part - you won’t understand because you prefer authority to set monetary policy. The history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.

It's a waste because the energy is not spent creating real value. If energy spend's goal is to make energy spend valuable and nothing else, it's a waste and evolutionary deadend. Your example is wrong because in diodes and valves waste heat is a byproduct of getting real value not the goal (when heating is the goal and provides actual value of people not dying from cold that is again real value).

> And the second part - you won’t understand because you prefer authority to set monetary policy

You will discover that monetary policy is always set by someone one way or another. Choose if you want it to be democratically elected to serve you government or randos who happen to have a bunch of BTC from selling drugs to kids on black market or scamming and ransomwaring people (this is it's biggest use case).

It’s not wrong, you just don’t like it, don’t get it. It’s ok; you will eventually. Everyone does.

In the scenario I trust the later more than the former! And that’s fine, we have different perspectives.

You wanna shut us down, I want you to ignore us, See the difference?

> In the scenario I trust the later more than the former

You made your choice, that's fine, just don't pretend it's virtuous.