"Once you realize what Proof of Work is really about, you'll get even more angry"

Bitcoin "mining" is a concept that is difficult to explain. In the recent Daily Beast article "Crypto Mines are Making Life a 'Daily Hell' for This Tiny North Carolina Town," university researcher Alex de Vries provides a good explanation of the Proof of Work protocol colloquially described as "mining." And he believes that his explanation will make you even more angry about the likely impacts on our community.

 “Once you realize what Proof of Work is really about, you’ll get even more angry,” Alex de Vries, a researcher of sustainability of crypto assets at the at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, told The Daily Beast. Information is added to a public database called the blockchain in units called blocks. “For every block that is created, whoever creates that block gets a reward of 6.25 bitcoins,” de Vries, who is also the creator of Digiconomist, a platform that has documented Bitcoin’s energy usage, explained. “Now, there’s a big catch to that, because in order to be able to create a block, you actually have to participate in what is effectively a massive number guessing game.”
Only the machine that guesses this number correctly can create the next block. “The whole Bitcoin network is just generating 200 quintillion of guesses every second of the day, nonstop,” de Vries said. “The more computational power you have, the bigger your chance of getting lucky and being the one to obtain that reward.”

This cycle continues in perpetuity every 10 minutes to create a block that holds, on average, information for about three transactions. “The noise that people are hearing is just machines playing a guess-the-number game. And pretty much all of that information they generate is completely useless,” de Vries said. “It’s not like, if they guessed incorrectly, that it has any further purpose. It’s just immediately discarded.”

Read the complete article HERE.