Replying to 424ad77e...

Work is the only thing that humans can't fake.

Any other system we try to come up with ends in the powerful exploiting the little guy.

The energy consumption isn't a bug, it's a feature.

I know how crazy that sounds to the modern ear, but it's necessary.

The high demand for energy places extreme pressure on efficiency gains and, more importantly, finding the cheapest energy possible.

Cheap energy is the energy that is currently being wasted, or at least, underutilized.

It seems counterintuitive, but bitcoin's high energy usage will cause a massive REDUCTION in human impact on the environment.

In the end;

PoS = Control (not security) by the rich.

PoW = Security (not control) by those who put in the most work.
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Mathias 2y ago

Thanks, that's a very interesting way of thinking at the energy impact. It makes sense. At the same time I can also feel that Bitcoin itself is also in some way governed/controlled by a number of hosts/nodes in combination with all of the miners. So the argument that POS are governed by a few rich would apply for Bitcoin as well no?

The rest of the Bitcoin network would take direct effect if the few majority holders or the major minors decided to do something?

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424ad77e... 2y ago

Bitcoin is governed by individual nodes. Currently there are at least 10K (some estimates up to 50K), many of them behind Tor.

Anyone can run a node if they are willing to devote enough storage to hold the timechain (blockchain) and a few hundred Kb of bandwidth per day. It can easily be done with less than $100 USD worth of hardware.

All of the software is MIT licensed (FOSS) and many people run older versions to ensure no malicious changes are put into updates.

Any node that doesn't agree with my node is simply ignored by my node. What we call the bitcoin network is simply all those nodes that agree on the same set of rules.

Miners compete to find blocks that are accepted by the majority of nodes.