Comment by luke5441
13 hours ago
Depends on if you see the use case of censorship resitant payment as something we should allow or not (such as paying the Ayatollah to go through the strait).
I for one don't.
13 hours ago
Depends on if you see the use case of censorship resitant payment as something we should allow or not (such as paying the Ayatollah to go through the strait).
I for one don't.
But even of you do see the use, why not proof of stake rather than proof of work?
It's far less studied and didn't exist (to any usable degree) at the time it was made. And it's extremely different, organizationally, so it's a difficult migration to pull off. And it has different incentives. And most miners have a lot of costs (e.g. hardware) that won't be recoverable if it's changed, so there's a fairly strong incentive to not change it.
Ethereum uses proof of stake now though (since 2022). Which happened in part because Ethereum is effectively centralized, or at least significantly more-so than Bitcoin.
I'm not an expert on this, but maybe it is easier to pressure the verifiers to not verify sanctioned entities? Seems to be already happening with Ethereum US nodes maintaining OFAC lists. Maybe one can also pressure them to verify alternative blocks without the transactions, then they won't be possible.
Other than that, it is probably tradition at this point, like with Gold.
I'll throw "proof-of-useful-work" into the ring. Reallocating at least a portion of BTCs verification onto existing energy costs could go a long way. Not suggesting it would be easy or that the entire network would be able to agree on what tasks to use, just that it's a theoretical option.
It's also not simply a matter of agreeing on what tasks to use. The task has to be computationally difficult to perform, but computationally trivial to verify. It must also be verifiable with only the context of the blockchain (no "oracle" that can make claims about real-world events).
Primecoin exist(ed?) and used the search for Mersenne prime numbers as its proof-of-work. That was 13 years ago and is still the only example I know of "proof-of-useful-work", and it would not be difficult to find sour voices challenging its usefulness.