On another note, since you express desire for “stimulating discussion”, I wish to address this on a technical level. Speaking here only as to Bitcoin, since “crypto” is such a fuzzy buzzword nowadays:
Mining costs play a large roll in the end value of Crypto. The more resources destroyed in mining, the more digital currency that is created
It is a common and pernicious myth that mining gives Bitcoin its value. It doesn’t—at least, not directly. Mining does
contribute to the security of Bitcoin, which in turn enables Bitcoin to become valuable. But it is only one subsystem in an intricate machine, and not in any way Bitcoin’s font of value.
A quick explanation of what mining actually does:
As you perhaps understand (and please say if you do not), Bitcoin is a global, distributed ledger. A
decentralized ledger, which must be kept absolutely synchronized between untrusted and mutually untrusting nodes. This raises something which crypto eggheads call the “double-spend problem”: How can a thief be stopped from cheating the system by sending the same money to two different people at once, by creating two different entries in two disagreeing versions of the ledger?
Preventing double-spends requires everybody in the entire world to agree on the
ordering of transactions: If the thief sent the same money to Alice, then a microsecond later to Bob, then somehow Alice and Bob must both know that Alice got the money first, and the second transaction was therefore invalid.
This is where the theoreticians start talking about Byzantine Generals and Byzantine Fault Tolerance. I would not usually drop a Wikipedia link; but this should give a reasonable overview at a level comprehensible to any intelligent person:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_toleranceIn Bitcoin, “miners” provide Byzantine Fault Tolerance to the network’s enforcement of the ordering of the transactions. That is what miners do. That is
all miners do. It is a very valuable task—a “large roll [
sic]”, as you put it; that is why miners get paid for performing it. But nevertheless, it is only one component of Bitcoin.
For an excellent overview of all the moving parts in the Bitcoin machine, their various histories, and how Satoshi fit them all together, I suggest this article:
Narayanan, A; Clark, J. “
Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree”. ACM
Queue, vol. 15 issue 4 (2017-08-29)
Now, as you can see:
0. Miners do not create the value of Bitcoin.
1. To make a cryptocurrency which does not require resource use similar to Bitcoin’s proof-of-work mining, you must find some other way to provide Byzantine Fault Tolerance. Well—either that, or discard the decentralized property of the network, and put the network under the substantial control of a central trusted party. Digicash in the 1990s was a cryptography-based currency which did not need any “mining” scheme, because it relied on a bank to issue notes and prevent double-spends. But reliance on central trusted parties is anathema to Bitcoin. Observe too, Digicash failed because no bank wanted to be its central trusted party!
Very smart people spent about two decades trying to overcome the double-spend problem. Satoshi Nakamoto was the first person ever to proffer a solution which did not rely on a trusted party. Other schemes (such as proof-of-stake) have been proposed; but none has the security properties of Bitcoin’s proof-of-work. Perhaps some rare genius may someday outdo Satoshi, and invent a new way to provide Byzantine Fault Tolerance; but thus far, nobody has. I know I’ve tried. I have spent endless hours and months and years pondering this precise issue.
Contra what you say, this is not a “New Crypto Idea!” Not new at all. But it is really not an easy problem. It is not a matter of waving your hands and saying, “What if there was a way to create crypto based on saving resources rather than based on destroying resources”.
What if there was a way? Well,
how?
