Blockchain is all about security, and Proof of Work IS that security. The Bitcoin blockchain and the Proof of Work consensus mechanism solved an unsolvable problem. Digital is great, and we can hook anything up to anything else. It’s all compatible. But digital has an inherent problem. There is no way to protect digital data from being copied, hence from being stolen.
There was no way to stop a hacker from getting into any digital system and doing whatever they want. A clever hacker does what he does and runs off ten thousand copies of Windows to sell on the black market for $50 each. Fourteen-year-old kids can hack into the Pentagon, and credit card companies, banks, and PayPal. There are billions of dollars a day being stolen digitally, simply because it can be. There was no way to stop that from happening. Software developers have tried for decades to come up with ways to protect digital data from being stolen. They were not successful.
Until Bitcoin. The Proof of Work consensus mechanism, along with blockchain solves the age-old problem of stopping the copying of digital creation. You cannot copy a bitcoin. So you cannot double-spend a bitcoin. It’s impossible! This means if someone is sending you bitcoin, you will receive genuine bitcoin. You can’t not. It’s feasibly impossible to corrupt the Bitcoin network.
This is because even at this early stage of adoption, there are up to 500,000 dedicated ASIC computers spread around the world running flat out 24/7, all working to secure the Bitcoin network. It’s a demonstration of how secure this new monetary technology is, and how complex it is to secure something so valuable. This achievement is only possible thru Proof of Work.
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ASIC = Application Specific Integrated Circuit.
Removing Proof of Work will remove the security of the protocol. It will remove the security of the network. So it won’t ever happen. Because Proof of Work is the solution to protecting digital data. Proof of Work is a solution, not a problem. It is a deliberate part of the Bitcoin design. It is not a mistake or an issue, or should it be seen as one? It is the future of how we can secure digital systems of scale running on the Internet.
ASIC mining computer
ASIC miners running in sequence
ASIC miners on scale
ASIC miners by the thousand
On scale by the tens of thousands:
It said that Bitcoin mining collectively uses over half of one percent of global electricity production to secure its network. When Bitcoin has been adopted by the entire world’s population, the number of transactions to be mined will increase a hundredfold. Hence the amount of these miners will also increase.
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More computers are not needed because of the increase in transactions, it’s just free market competition at play. But what more computers joining the network do, make the network more secure.
Bitcoin is amazing in so many ways, and one of those ways is that no permission is required to do anything. Anyone can become a miner, a node, a contributor, or an owner of as many bitcoin as they can afford to buy. No central party governs the Bitcoin network. This decentralization of an unregulated form of money, with no rules attached, is a demonstration that the Bitcoin concept is workable and successful. The very essence of that success is Proof of Work. PoW is in my view, the most important digital anything ever created.
Proof of Work has given rise to the term “trustless”. The Bitcoin network works so well and so consistently, and it has proven millions of times over to work as per design, that faith in the system comes from the very fact that no trust (faith) is required. Bitcoin is not only a new form of money, this new form of money is controlled by software alone. Computer code in a specific format now allows us the ability to create a world reserve currency. And no one can stop this from happening. It’s already happened. You cannot turn Bitcoin off. The only way is to turn off the Internet. Even then, the Bitcoin protocol will still exist, and when the Internet is turned back on the Bitcoin network will pick up from where it left off.
What Proof of Work has shown is that we can now develop secure global systems to control everything important in our lives. The advent of Bitcoin has directly led to the next generation of software. Systems that are so secure, are incorruptible. That is only possible thru Proof of Work. To say PoW must be removed and replaced with an inferior mechanism is ridiculous. That’s like saying if we remove the trees, the forest will still be there. The trees are the forest and the Proof of Work is Bitcoin.
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Proof of Work is the most secure Internet protocol ever created.