You're thinking from the perspective of the miners.

From the perspective of the hardware manufacturers that's an advantage. If you're making the hardware and you come up with a 10% energy savings, everyone must now replace their old hardware or be left in the dust. Hardware manufacturers will make a killing. The prisoner's dilemma you are thinking of only applies to the miners, it's a benefit for the parties selling them the hardware.

> Hardware manufacturers will make a killing. The prisoner's dilemma you are thinking of only applies to the miners

Something something shovels in a gold rush...

Does the efficiencies discovered not get distributed to the rest of the economy? My point was that it could lead to developments in energy use beneficial in separate domains.

The more efficient your hardware is the more profit you make per block (because you buy less electricity per block reward).

If all hardware was equivalent and an unlimited amount were available efficiency wouldn't matter, but neither of those things are true.

Wouldn't the difficult per block rise, making it the same current usage as before?

The difficulty rises with the total hashrate across all miners, not on the individual hashrate/efficiency of any particular miner - if you can eke out a temporary efficiency advantage over everybody else, you can profit nicely while they're trying to catch up.

Eventually. But newer hardware will tend to be the most efficient component of the hashrate and push out older hardware by generating more hashes per unit of electricity (hence the CPU->GPU->ASIC progression).

That doesn't mean anything.

Bitcoin network bandwidth remains the same, and energy usage has continued to increase in a race to the bottom in terms of work and waste for bitcoin mining - this is by design of how Satoshi's difficulty algorithm reduces efficiency with increase in hash rates.

There are projects like gridcoin, uscore dot net, that use mining to compute scientific research. It is considering using a Proof Of Research approach.

It would be game changing if blockchain mining efforts could be applied like this to other uses as well, like someone needing huge datasets analyzed and formatted into a presentable state on an ad-hoc basis, sort of like AWS Athena.

Just found out about Filecoin which is an interesting concept, you "mine" by storing and serving files people save to the network.

Stuff like this is a much more interesting use of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology in my opinion, instead of burning electricity for PoW you can do meaningful work while collecting a reward.

FileCoin and Upfiring both claim to have this PoW, but their Github repos are empty and their Reddit channels are drowning in shilling.

Unfortunate, I like the concept - I wouldn’t mind giving up a couple TB of space on my FreeNAS rig that’s currently going unused.

And the point of blockchain is to set a minimum difficulty level of work, which translates to a minimum energy use.

It translates to a maximum cost per hash calculation, which becomes a minimum level of energy efficiency.

I think the only energy efficiency PoW can hope for is the demise of traditional banks and what energy they consume.