Are there any bitcoiners who have written about the abstract concept of proof of work as a central component of human interactions? Example: conspicuous spending as a signal of one's wealth. Or advanced degrees as a signal of one's intelligence and abilities. One might argue to categorize these somewhat differently, perhaps proof of "burn" rather than work, but there is a unifying something going on here. The challenge is to figure out what exactly the unifying concept is and how to put it into words.

The purpose of PoW, or proof of burn or whatever, is to signal something to somebody. To signal what? For the sake of this post let's just call it "virtue." Virtue signaling, by its inherent nature, perhaps by definition, must incur some sort of expense. When we look at it that way, our usual reaction is to deem it a fundamentally wasteful thing. But perhaps the desire to obviate the need for virtue signaling is inherently misguided, in the same sense that the desire to replace PoW with proof of stake is misguided. It's like trying to make a perpetual motion machine: it simply goes against the laws of physics.

But perhaps what can be done, and what should be pursued, is the "optimization" of virtue signaling. What does that mean? I would argue that sub-optimized virtue signaling means work (or effort, or burn, or whatever) that is intended to prove something, but which is done in a way that is not perfectly provable. Maybe only a small fraction of the work is provable. Or maybe it's provable, but inconsistently so. Or perhaps the intended recipients of the signal simply don't know how to interpret the signal, i.e. don't know how to verify the proof; like using a language the recipient does not understand.

Arguably, this is what bitcoin achieves: an optimization of PoW. Perhaps in the broader perspective, it is "virtue signaling" in its purest form. It may still have stuff to teach us about the human condition from a broader perspective.