The giant pile of dirt on my back yard is proof that I did hours of hard work with a tea spoon. Much less efficient than a shovel would have been, as a metaphor for hash algorithms designed to be difficult.

Why is that proof of work of any value, to anyone?

Hard work, just for the sake of hard work, is a great ideal to the the previous generations - but we traditionally have based our economy on how much your work benefits someone, not how hard you worked.

Mining bitcoin is extremely hard, with precisely zero benefit. The only thing of value is the work itself. Quite zen, even.

Do you genuinely not understand the idea of proof of work, or are you just attempting to conceal your actual point, which is that you don’t think the transactions in the Bitcoin network are very valuable?

You’re making it sound like you genuinely don’t understand proof of work. Proof of work is the reason that it is effectively impossible to fraudulently alter Bitcoin transactions. Again, it’s fine if you don’t care about that because you don’t see any value in those transactions, but surely you recognize the huge importance of preventing the modification of previous transactions in any sort of payment system.

> The giant pile of dirt on my back yard is proof that I did hours of hard work with a tea spoon.

It isn't proof: you could have used a digger. The point of Bitcoin-style proof-of-work is that everyone has to use a teaspoon, and if you want to 'go back in time' and rewrite transactions you have to do more work with a teaspoon than everyone else is doing.

> The only thing of value is the work itself. Quite zen, even.

Or would be, if GPUs could experience enlightenment.

One day, maybe.

Everybody in this thread knows that it's called proof of work. What you call it is not the point.