proof-of-work systems should be banned by international treaty and people who implement them should be considered hostis humani generis tbh

i'm not sure a neat academic idea has ever before caused such atrocious damage to the world, let alone a mathematical one

the bitcoin system has probably already burned through an amount of energy greater than that expended in the course of WWII. probably many times greater

i know for a fact the amount it uses *every year* is orders of magnitude higher, almost incomprehensibly vastly so, than the energy of all explosives detonated throughout the war combined, the nukes included

and remember, entire cities were flattened -- the damage it did to Stalingrad in particular makes Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like they *got off easy*

i'm not against cryptocurrencies in principle, as long as we have a digital market economy we're gonna need *some* kind of system for black market transactions, but the PoW system? crime against humanity. we need to find alternatives -- like, just use a fixed number of tokens that are sold off when the currency is established or something

@velartrill That's not what proof of work is for, the creation of tokens is completely separate from confirming transactions, which is the purpose of PoW. In particular there are already PoW cryptocurrencies with a fixed amount of tokens.

@timorl oh, shit. so you need PoW to confirm transactions? or is there a way to do that without PoW?

@velartrill Yup, the main contender afaik is proof of stake, which tries to base this on market incentives. You "bet" you won't cheat, and as long as a portion (usually 2/3, because math) of the people participating are honest everything works (and cheaters are punished). A big part of the idea is that you would have to amass an enormous portion of the total worth of the currency to disrupt it, and as soon as you did all that would be worthless almost immediately.