r/bitcoin Mar 19, 11:40 AM
Do you think proof of work mining will meaningfully evolve, or has the model basically reached its final form? I've followed Bitcoin mining closely for a long time and one thing that's always been remarkable is how stable the core proof-of-work model has been.
SHA-256, difficulty adjustment, block reward halving - the fundamentals set in 2009 are still running exactly as designed.
At the same time, the scale of the infrastructure has changed enormously. The amount of specialized hardware and electricity dedicated to securing Bitcoin globally is a different order of magnitude than anything Satoshi could have anticipated.
That got me thinking about whether PoW as a concept has meaningful architectural room to evolve. Not changing Bitcoin - that's not what I'm asking. But as a consensus model, could mining infrastructure ever do more than just compute hashes?
While looking into this I came across Qubic which seems to be experimenting with exactly this question: mining hardware contributing to useful computation beyond hashing while still securing a network.
Do you think PoW has architectural innovation left, or is the current model essentially the final state?
submitted by /u/jorchjorch
[link] [comments]