52 - Durable, Low Energy Bitcoin PoW
BIP: 52 Layer: Consensus (hard fork) Title: Durable, Low Energy Bitcoin PoW Author: Michael Dubrovsky Bogdan Penkovsky Comments-Summary: No comments yet. Comments-URI: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/wiki/Comments:BIP-0052 Status: Draft Type: Standards Track Created: 2021-05-13 License: BSD-2-Clause OPL == Simple Summary == Bitcoin's energy consumption is growing with its value (see Figure below). Although scaling PoW is necessary to maintain the security of the network, reliance on massive energy consumption has scaling drawbacks and leads to mining centralization. A major consequence of the central role of local electricity cost in mining is that today, most existing and potential participants in the Bitcoin network cannot profitably mine Bitcoin even if they have the capital to invest in mining hardware. From a practical perspective, Bitcoin adoption by companies like Tesla (which recently rescinded its acceptance of Bitcoin as payment) ha...