Since it's not physical like gold or silver you don't need mining equipment, you should just be able to create infinite copies. So why does bitcoin need to be "mined" and why would mining it cost so much energy?
The idea of crypto is that, for any particular transaction, there are a few people who would directly benefit from fraud, but they’re vastly outnumbered by all the regular crypto users who aren’t affected one way or the other by the transaction, and just want it to be recorded and processed accurately.
Since it’s not feasible, not secure, and not private to try to keep track of all the people that use crypto, the way that the protocols decide what version of a transaction is approved by the indifferent masses is with ‘proof of work’. The coins have algorithms to mathematically prove how many hours you left your computer grinding away at menial calculations, and whichever listing of a transaction has the most processor-time (carbon in the atmosphere) behind it is considered official.
It's not just the richest person, you have to control the majority of global processor power. The assumption is that, even at the top, where people have warehouse sized rigs, there's supposed to be enough conflicting interests that no one would be able to coordinate a majority. It still could theoretically happen though.
In hindsight, people would be able to see that fraud had happened, but the transaction would have gone through.
No you are describing 'proof of stake' where the man with the most crypto coins gets to dictate which transactions clear. Proof of work means the man with the most graphic cards makes this decision, how he acquired all those graphic cards is immaterial.
Yes, but the other part of this is that after each transaction / coin production, the amount of computation needed to do the next one increases. So, even not adding additional mining capacity, it will continue to use more electricity-or, given that no capacity will be added but capacity has been reached, will continue to get slower and slower.
This is the 'official' reason musk dropped bcoin
Yeah Musk dropped Bitcoin for his own reasons, but when that happened someone posted an amazing stat - if you bought a whole Tesla with Bitcoin, the mining time would increase the lifetime carbon emissions by like, 10x or something.
The work your computer does to generate the coin is what makes it "real"... otherwise I could just be like yeah I got like 6000 bitcoins over here trust me.
Because it's literally a Captain Planet villain thing where they turn on the machine that prints money and also pollution
Real answer: the proof of work is required, because that means you have to control over half of the network's computing power in order to spoof any transactions. It basically ensures that the people participating are disincentivized from creating fake transactions, because if you're paying the money to provide the computing power, you'll lose it by spoofing transactions and fucking with the trust in the system. It's not impossible, just from a game theory perspective illogical.
It's actually not a terrible idea for a world in which global warming doesn’t exist, but well...
As for the meme response: it's because suffering is the only way to provide value in a capitalist system
