this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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At scale no, it can't and that'll never be the case because at any given time, someone will be willing to put more energy (work) into it to gain an advantage - so as long as there's demand for that coin, PoW will always demand huge amounts of energy.
And yes, I do blame the consensus protocol because ultimately that's the culprit of causing this incentive to waste energy and targeting miners or any other actors is an utter waste of time.
>At scale
what does that mean?
meaning PoW is not such a problem when applied to create consensus in local or niche blockchains as the difficulty (and energy consumption) is orders of magnitude lower. For widely used coins it's a terrible choice.
PoW isn't a problem at all.
> at any given time, someone will be willing to put more energy (work) into it to gain an advantage
that's not a problem with the protocol. that's a problem with people. that's like saying that houses are a problem because people rent them to exploit the working class. the problem isn't the house, it's the people who try to buy all the houses.
I never said there's a problem with the protocol - that's indeed, working as intended. There IS a problem of using the protocol (at scale) though, because it creates this unsustainable environment.
As another comment put it: PoW is the coal burning of this era.
Using it for your bbq is no big deal. Using it to generate energy for half the world is awful.
>There IS a problem of using the protocol (at scale) though, because it creates this
unsustainable environment.
this isn't true. the protocol is still functioning fine. the problem is how people are using the protocol.
And there's no way to use it so that it doesn't consume huge amounts of energy because of greed and because of how computers work.
So very much a problem of using PoW.
you can certainly use it: using the protocol to transact doesn't contribute meaningfully to power consumption. power consumption is almost entirely in the mining.