Good Riddance to Proof of Work?

We spent a great day yesterday outlining how smart contracts worked for our students. I even managed to do a live creation and consumption of the smart contract. After hacking kettles, dolls, CCTV cameras, and so on, I think that demonstrating a smart contract to an audience — and where it worked — is perhaps the most satisfying demonstration that I have ever given. Why? Because I was showing a new way of thinking. An alternative. A way to get students thinking about the options they may have in designing systems.

One of the elements of the demonstration is the usage of gas, and where we can view the data on the Ethereum blockchain chain without paying anything. But, once we want to chain the state of the data contained in a smart contract, we must pay the miners some gas for their work — a Proof of Work (PoW). It’s a standard way to make sure that miners are trustworthy.

But, Bitcoin has not given PoW a good name and is consuming so much wasteful energy — just to make sure we have a consensus every 10 minutes or so on the current list of transactions. Satoshi built a great model, but now it is flawed. While Bitcoin will struggle to release itself from PoW, Ethereum is now moving towards Proof of Stake (PoS). At the current time, Ethereum consumes around 113 TeraWatts-hours per year. Along with this, the GPUs used for the mining process are often discarded after…