Cryptocurrency mining using integrated photonics

> Cost of entering oPoW hardware manufacturing will be much lower

That just means more mining hardware will be manufactured and used. They might use less energy to run each one, but that likely to be balanced out by the energy costs of manufacture and the e-waste. More mining hardware will mean the difficulty will be increased by the system.

If a Bitcoin is worth $40,000, a miner somewhere will be prepared to spend approaching $40,000 to mine it. That money will be spent on a combination of buying the hardware and energy for running the hardware.

Any reduction in energy use or hardware costs will just mean the $40,000 will stretch further, meaning more e-waste and/or more energy use, and an adjustment in difficulty by the network.

Public blockchain systems are distributed databases that anyone can submit write transactions to and where you don't need preauthorisation to join the system. In order to avoid the network being taken over by sybil attacks, it's necessary for participation to be based on locking up / committing / consuming something rare. Anything that becomes cheap or easy is not suitable for basing participation on.

So far I know of systems using computational work (PoW), ownership of cryptocurrency (PoS), or storage space as that rare resource. The idea of using photonics to create a low energy 'proof of time' basis is interesting but there would still be difficult economic considerations. If acquiring the photonics is too hard, then you've got a centralised system, if it's too easy then the sybil resistance and environmental impact benefit goes away (because control of the system devolves into 'who can acquire the most hardware' incentivising massive production).

Perhaps surprisingly, improving the cost efficiency of the work done by a traditional PoW blockchain doesn't reduce its energy usage, because the usage is determined by a competitive market place driven by supply & demand, not by a fixed amount of work needing to be done. Increasing the cost efficiency of the calculations just results in the blockchain doing more calculations.

A huge chunk of the cost is in the electricity used, so power efficiency and cost efficiency are very very similar. Ultimately I don't think you can improve matters much by attacking power efficiency of the calculations. You may be able to move the economic balance point between upfront/ongoing costs by requiring more or more expensive hardware, but reducing ongoing electricity usage isn't a clear win if it's produced more waste and power usage during the creation and ultimate disposal of the hardware.

> Cost of entering oPoW hardware manufacturing will be much lower due to Silicon Photonics using old CMOS nodes (~90 or 220 nm vs. ~7 nm for transistors).

If silicon photonics using old process nodes is so competitive, cheap to manufacture and power-efficient, why aren't they planning to use it for general purpose workloads? Matrix-vector multiplication is a key operation for most GPU compute, including for machine learning. They say "...On the other hand, to be competitive in the field of machine learning, one needs to compute billions of multiply-accumulate operations per second" but that kind of scale out applies just as much to crypto mining, and is the part that's supposedly addressed by reusing old process nodes.

Using PoW crypto at all creates massive waste for no productive use. In a world struggling to avoid catastrophic climate changes, it is completely irresponsible, and should be stopped instantly.

Not to mention, crypto currencies are worse than traditional currencies in every way: much more wasteful than the whole global banking system for a tiny tiny tiny fraction of a percentage of the number of transactions, much more centralized in several ways, deflationary, impossible to control if they spiral. There is no reason to keep this charade going.

Proof of work is wasteful in the same sense that having banks is wasteful. Imagine what it takes to operate a banking institution. It's not just electricity. It would be "efficient" to just write the word "bank" on a shack and then have one or two workers "guard" over all the deposits.

Unfortunately, nobody would be willing to use such a bank. Actual banks that people use need to spend a lot of money just on maintaining the charade of being proper custodians. Yet, they can still lose your deposit, in which case they rely on the government to bail them out.

Perhaps proof-of-stake is something that can mostly replace proof-of-work, but the proof is in the pudding.