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RE: Bitcoin’s energy consumption is a huge problem and that is why I’m investing in Gridcoin.
Such a dilemma: PoW provides security but at a huge ecological cost. The question is , is it worth it? Right now most likely NO, in the future, maybe Yes.
No, PoW is unsustainable.
The more important the blockchain gets, the more you need to invest to keep it running. It is a constant, maybe even increasing overhead.
And that is not new, Satoshi Nakamoto already at the start conceded that in the future Bitcoin has to change to more sustainable methods. Which is (technically) possible, but the miner's interest is too strong.
There have been some interesting proposals like fruitchain, a chain that is fair and prevent mining pools. The beauty of PoW, compared to POS and other consensus, is that it is pretty easy to constraint the security to some energy cost.
Too bad useful PoW is not widely spread.
I dont see its security as being all that good really, it inevitably leads to pools, who are operated by just a few very wealthy entities, who could easily collude at any time.
some proposals (like fruitchain) prevent mining pools. Still it doesn't solve everything.
It would be awesome if useful PoW was the default.
I couldnt find much easily available info on fruitchain, I wonder if it could work for PoS too; a few staking pools are popping up now and its bad news in my view.
fruitchain is a research paper so there is not much presentations: https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/916. Maybe there are more research like that but I haven't seen much yet.
Now I am wondering, do we want to make pools better or do we want to totally avoid them?? I don't have a definitive idea at this point.
Delegated Proof of Stake, as Steem has, is much better implementation.
Bitcoin and PoW is an unnecessary and overly used system that only results in huge amounts of power consumption to no end.
My main issue with DPOS is that it somehow push witness to be only companies, like PoW mining pools. At least there are more witness (TOP 20 vs 7 mining pools on ETH and BTC).
There's no rule that it's 20 witnesses, it can be 30 or 100. It's all about the chain preferences. Bitshares has ~27 at the moment and changes up and down from time to time.
I guess until it happens once on steem we won't know.