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Comment by mindcandy | Hacker News Reader

The point of the numbers is to prove that you heated space. Seriously. It proves that you burned value that you know you are not getting back if you are caught falsifying records for the system. And, everyone knows its extremely hard to not get caught if you try. Therefore you can be trusted to sign records for the system because you are risk:reward tremendously more financially motivated to be a good actor than a bad one --including whatever nefarious scenarios you might imagine.

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i understand the idea of proof-of-work. but idk, when i think about all that electricity and computing power wasted on guessing arbitrary numbers... just doesn't feel right

kind of reminds me of how FAANG job interviews require memorizing not-very-useful algo stuff to weed out people who "aren't motivated enough" to study that stuff for the interview¹... "proof-of-motivation" if you will. it serves a purpose, but requires "burning" a lot of ultimately pointless effort

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1. at least that's what people say about them, never interviewed there myself

"Pointless" only matters if it is "a lot" and "a lot" is relative. It seems like it has not been possible to resolve the question of whether the effort is necessary. If you suggest that existing monetary systems have orders of magnitude lower overhead, particularly fiat money, then people will argue that all sorts of costs are hidden. But I don't believe it makes up the difference, and I attribute peoples' willingness to believe it to the assumption/belief that anything that virally spreads cannot be drastically worse (in some dimension).

Nature is full of examples of intentional waste as a form of signaling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory

That said, IMO Proof of Work is indistinguishable from Proof of Stake with extra steps. And considering the massive environmental externality of Bitcoin mining, I want to see the major nations heavily tax, if not completely outlaw, Proof of Work mining.

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