[baddox]

I don't think it's "horrific," and I think the phrase "just to prevent fraudulent generation of blocks" vastly understates the awesomeness of having a virtually fraud-proof transaction log without relying on a centralized party.

[sliverstorm]

Well, if Bitcoin goes mainstream it seems like we could expect it would require 51% of all computational power on the planet at all times, which would indeed be horrific as well as tragic, IMO.

Sure, the perfect currency is valuable. But is such a sheer brute-force approach to security the best we can do?

[baddox]

What makes you think it would require 51% of all computational power? That would only be true if there were no other valuable things to compute, which is very unlikely to be the case.