If the amount of throughput and everything else remains constant while more and more computers are in a zero-sum arms race to waste electricity to solve a useless hash problem, then it is by definition not useful except for “securing the network”.
And if you can secure a network some other way, then it definitely becomes better by any arbitrary order of magnitude, assuming your utility function doesn’t place infinite value on securing 10 transactions a second with to over 99.9999% certainty and willing to waste all the world’s electricity to do it.
Literally even if you value all other uses of electricity put together as 1/100000 of securing Bitcoin then in a few years banning PoW becomes the right move.
But I imagine it will be like the war on drugs — impossible to totally eradicate, since mining rewards become more lucrative every year forever. Until bitcoin blackouts are frequent in the first world, msot people won’t care though.
Imagine if people asked how many emails (SMTP), conversations (VOIP) or websites (HTTP) the Internet can ever handle pet second and the answer was 10, no matter how many computers joined the network. Because every time you had to make progress, everything went through one bottleneck called a miner. Would this be the topology you want to reward with ever-more-valuable rewards?
Imagine if BitTorrent worked this way, and every computer would seed every file. And maximalists said that this was the ONLY AND BEST WAY.
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