Quote:
Originally Posted by BananaPancakes
"Mining coins" is actually a really poor metaphor for what is actually going on, because it suggests you're just putting in a lot of work to find a new coin.
What these computers/nodes are doing is maintaining the public ledger and verifying new transactions to make sure they are not fraudulant and getting a reward for doing so.
The way bitcoin does it with their proof of work algorithm is really inefficient, but one could argue that what it's doing is still valuable.
|
Yeah I think that's part of the problem. Once things switch to Proof of Stake (or something other than Proof of Work), the work required from computers should drop significantly.
Right now the mining computers are working harder (and consuming a lot of electricity) to solve algorithms to earn currency. If they were only maintaining the ledger the energy usage would drop. To become a useful currency, we need to move away from Proof of Work.