Bitcoin Mining Proof of Work Costs: Large, Wasteful but Fair
Is the cost of proof of work in bitcoin mining fair? Tomaso Aste of the UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies at the University College London’s Department of Computer Science thinks the current cost large and wasteful, but nonetheless, fair. Aste recently examined the factors that determine the current proof of work cost in a study titled “The fair cost of Bitcoin proof of work.” Aste noted that bitcoin has proven that untrustful peers can exchange value over the Internet without any third party intermediary or trusted authority, as bitcoin has surpassed $10 billion in capitalization and....
Related News
The University College London’s blockchain research center has found that bitcoin's current proof-of-work (PoW) mining costs are necessary to maintain the network's trustless and decentralized nature. In a recent research note, Tomaso Aste, a professor of complexity sciences and director of the UCL's Centre for Blockchain Technologies, offers a rough measure for calculating the "equilibrium fair cost" of bitcoin’s PoW system, suggesting that this fair cost per block is roughly $10,000 – less than the current amount earned by discovering a block today. The findings are notable....
It is possible that when compared to rare metals, bitcoin mining is not as wasteful in terms of environmental impact, but it remains clear that there could be better and more efficient uses of cryptocurrency mining power than solving arbitrary cryptographic problems. This belief can be seen in a number of innovative projects announced in recent weeks that seek to use bitcoin's mining power to do everything from storing genetic material to archiving important data. This increasingly important question about the future of one of bitcoin's core industries arrives at a time industrial mining....
NeuCoin, an extensively modified proof-of-stake cryptocurrency based on Peercoin, released its 39-page whitepaper Wednesday, following a year of development. NeuCoin, its developers say, has the potential to “realize Satoshi’s original vision” by addressing the issues of increasing transaction fees, centralization of mining and divergence of interests between miners and regular coin holders in Bitcoin. Through the utilization of proof-of-stake as opposed to Bitcoin’s proof-of-work, separate parties become united and transaction costs are reduced to a negligible amount. “We believe....
Proof-of-Work (PoW) cryptocurrency mining has been the subject of bad press in recent times. Critics argue that excessive energy consumption, and its use of fossil fuels, are wasteful and causing irreparable damage to the environment. But, UK-based entrepreneur Josh Riddett hopes to change that with his renewable energy business, which turns cow dung into energy […]
The cryptocurrency world has been adapting to the current demands and generating new consensus algorithms with better functionalities. The first consensus algorithm was the Proof of Work algorithm, but today there are various protocols such as Proof of Stake and Proof of Space. Specific consensus algorithms offer certain advantages over others. For example, the Proof of Stake algorithm is a more secure, faster and cheaper consensus protocol than Proof of Work. LaneAxis, the world’s freight brokerless direct freight network, utilizes a Proof of Stake algorithm to ensure quick transactions....