Proof-of-work should be banned

The anti-Bitcoin mental gymnastics get more and more hilarious every cycle.

You don’t have to feel this bad, just buy Bitcoin!

This is like saying incandescent light bulbs should be banned. Sure, it’s a sensible thing to say once you have unilaterally-better bulbs already fully commercialized and in mass production. (And this happened with CFLs and then LED bulbs; and then we did ban incandescents, here in Canada and in many other places.)

But we’re not at that “fully commercialized and in mass production” inflection point yet with Proof-of-Stake networks. They exist, but none have the transaction load (and thus the network build-out to absorb the transaction load) that Bitcoin has.

Forcing a switch to PoS now, would be like trying to force a switch to CFLs or LED bulbs only a year or two after they were invented. What would you imagine would happen as a result? The incandescent manufacturers would go out of business, and the CFL/LED manufacturers wouldn’t yet have been able to absorb the demand. Nobody would be able to buy lightbulbs. This kind of a ban is effectively just demanding to kill the sector as a whole.

Once an old technology is on its way out in the market anyway — and it’s only stubborn locked-in enterprise hold-outs, rather than greenfield adoption, continuing the relevance of the old tech — then it can be banned, to force those enterprise hold-outs to switch over to the new tech. That’s entirely appropriate. But the market knows when tech is mature, and the market itself switches over when that happens. Trying to force the market is just acting without the same distributed knowledge the market represents. It’s central top-down allocation trying to solve distributed problems, like the failure of the USSR.

To be clear, I’m a developer for Proof-of-Stake ecosystem tooling myself. But I think all PoS developers would agree that there’s no Proof-of-Stake mainnet network that yet has the capacity to absorb all of Bitcoin’s transaction flow—and there’s no reason that one or more governments saying “you have a year to transition to PoS” would change this.

The existing PoS chains are at the level of infrastructure development now, that the CFL+LED bulb industries were at around the year 1990. Do you think they could have suddenly achieved their 2014 (= the year Canada banned incandescents) level of infrastructure development in one year, if people just threw money at them? Technology—its productization, its operationalization, and ecosystem tooling adaptation—takes time.

That'd be me.

Yep, a total of < 1$, on an single, unknown and not even traded, but old coin (which I won't even mention) that is not going anywhere. Basically for fun.

Yes, let perfect be the enemy of the good.

"How dare they put their money where their mouth is?!"

"How dare they invest in what they think is a less harmful alternative?!"

"How dare they question our ponzi scheme!?"