Re:Blockchain Challenge by Bank of England
by brighton36 on Monday December 07, 2015 @08:34PM
(#10694196)
Burning cycles is the glue that binds a new block to the chain. The strength of this glue is what enables bitcoin's censorship degree of resistance. You may find censorship wasteful (and I don't particularly need that either), but the entirety of the bitcoin economy disagrees. Similarly I think people who have a two hour drive to work is wasteful.
Gasoline at least gets you from A to B. Burning cycles is much more wasteful. Bitcoin's proof of work/waste is really something like 'I can prove that it is statistically likely that I wasted a shit-ton of power heating this data centre, doing SHA hashes, trying to find one that has a high number of leading zeros.' That's pretty wasteful IMO.