Replying to Avatar U-P-G-R-A-Y-E-D-D

Not him too. This is Saylor's nonsense rhetoric.

Bitcoin does not condense, store, or transfer energy (beyond what all networked computers do).

POW on a massive scale requires a lot of energy because it's a massive amount of computation. The vast majority of the input energy is converted to waste heat.

Saying otherwise betrays a lack of knowledge of computer science and/or physics.
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Jack K 3w ago đź’¬ 1

If energy spent produces only heat, how do you explain the existence of a persistent block afterward? What physical process made that block real?

Why can every node instantly reject an invalid block without redoing the work? If the work left no informational trace, wouldn’t validation require recomputation?

Is it possible that nobody has the proper framework to articulate this fully because we have not yet understood how bitcoin is the intersection of computer science, information theory, economics and physics into a measurable instantiation of time itself?

Clearly time is the biggest problem in physics; nobody has a full grasp on entropy.

I find it odd that Bitcoin produces time from entropy. Must be nothin’

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U-P-G-R-A-Y-E-D-D 3w ago đź’¬ 1

> Why can every node instantly reject an invalid block without redoing the work?

Because it takes a massive amount of compute to brute force the output of a hash function to have a long string of consecutive leading zeros (aka POW), and it takes very little compute to verify cryptographic signatures and hash outputs.

That's why they're sometimes referred to as "trapdoor functions."

Regarding where the energy goes, consider a solo mining rig that never finds a block. It heats the house, it doesn't magically condense the physical energy into "digital energy."

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Jack K 3w ago

You’re describing only the local thermodynamic outcome of a failed miner (heat) while ignoring the global thermodynamic structure that Bitcoin mining actually operates inside.

A solo rig that never finds a block contributes no local informational change. Yes we both agree here, but it absolutely does tehcnically contribute to the global entropy field set by the difficulty target. That difficulty defines a Boltzmann entropy surface over the 32-bit nonce space. The expected energy for a valid block is determined by that landscape, not by any individual machine’s waste heat.

This framing only accounts for dissipation, not for the fact that difficulty predefines the energy budget required for a valid state transition by quantizing the search space. This entropy field exists independently of any miner; it is the global thermodynamic environment into which miners inject work. A valid block header is a statistically rare microstate. It is the structured residue of the dissipated work and that is precisely why nodes can validate it instantly: the improbability is preserved in the structure.

Yes a failed solo miner’s energy becomes heat, but the network’s energy budget (the real cost of producing one improbable, verifiable microstate) is governed entirely by the thermodynamics of the difficulty field. Until you account for that, you’re not describing the whole system and the underlying transformation.