Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but PoW is going to become a liability in a world of energetic production. It is irrational to spend the same amount of energy on mining a digital token when it can be used to build and power actual productive robots.

If Bitcoin Core decides this is true and alters the algo to save the chain, it too will lead to collapse as a Balkanization will occur across the mining pools. The most likely outcome is disintegration.

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extraduder_ire 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Economically, the amount spent on electricity for PoW mining will be close to and generally below the payout for that mining.

The price in US dollars for either block rewards or electricity can go up or down, but this comparison always stays the same.

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usrnm 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It is irrational to spend the same amount of energy on mining a digital token when it can be used to build and power actual productive robots

It's just as irrational as it was 10 years ago, there have always been more productive uses for energy, but it doesn't really matter, people will always chose their own short-term profit, expecting anything else is delusional

	▲	ArchieScrivener 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		No, 10 years ago the threat was from financial collapse given the past 16 years of bubble induced recessions, energy usage was a store of value hedge against inflation. 10 years ago the first approved ETF was still 5 years away and institutional buyers were nonexistent. People will not always consider short term profit; thinking such is an irrational expectation.
	▲	jszymborski 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Further to this point, it's not like non-PoW coins like Ethereum are doing better at the moment.

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woleium 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I have no idea if it’s true, but i did see some estimates that the visa and mastercard systems also use the same order of magnitude of energy.

	▲	dghlsakjg 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Not sure if its true, but even if it is, those two corps transact nearly the same amount as the US GDP every year. Bitcoin's entire market cap is right now at a less than 1/10th of US GDP. Hard to say what the payment volume is since by all accounts, most movement in BTC is speculative rather than transactional.
	▲	Ekaros 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Even if they use same order of energy. They process many many more orders of magnitude transactions. And I doubt they use that much power. Modern developers are incapable of efficiency, but there is not that much processing to do.
	▲	JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> i did see some estimates that the visa and mastercard systems also use the same order of magnitude of energy I strongly believe they don’t, but I’d love to see the math and be proven wrong.
	▲	fmobus 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I hate having to defend Visa and MC, but at least they using that energy to enable day-to-day transactions that real people actually use. Also, and a bit harder to overlook... Visa/MC are able to work thousands of transactions per second in the US alone. Bitcoin can do like 7. Not seven thousand, just seven. Worldwide. It's not even a competition, really. BTC has no future without some radical changes.