There is a basic misconception that proof-of-work mechanisms are inherently unscalable and incur excessive energy consumption.
Following the original design of the proof-of-work blockchain, and promoted by the BSV Blockchain Association, this technology aims to achieve scalability while ensuring security and interoperability within a high-performance system.
Achieving proof-of-work scalability by increasing the number of transactions processed per second by a single block inherently reduces energy consumption significantly. Since a single block can accommodate more transactions, the energy consumption of a single transaction will naturally decrease, making the entire system more energy efficient.
Blockchain and distributed ledger network
It’s worth noting that proof-of-stake networks like those popularized by Ethereum cannot accurately be classified as blockchain networks. Instead, they are distributed ledger networks that mimic the architecture and operational processes of real blockchains, but lack the security and scalability.
In contrast, the BSV blockchain is a permissionless public chain that follows the original Bitcoin protocol rules and uses a proof-of-work consensus mechanism.
Therefore, the BSV blockchain is a viable alternative to Bitcoin Core (BTC) and other proof-of-stake blockchain protocols, and should be considered the benchmark for proof-of-work blockchains, rather than another one as high as BTC An energy-intensive proof-of-work implementation of Bitcoin.
A common misunderstanding about proof of work
As blockchain and crypto asset trading grow in popularity, one of the biggest misconceptions has arisen about Proof of Work. As transaction volume grows on blockchains such as BTC and Ethereum, recording and protecting individual transactions becomes slower and more expensive. This is known as the so-called “Blockchain Impossibility Triangle” and is often used as an excuse for the inability of proof-of-work networks to deliver top performance.
This "Blockchain Impossible Triangle" theory holds that a perfect blockchain should be decentralized, secure and scalable, but such a blockchain does not exist in reality because, you must You have to sacrifice one of the attributes to have the other two. Various efforts have been made to solve this problem, but these efforts either make the system more vulnerable to malicious actors or undermine the key model that makes blockchain attractive.
However, this theory does not take into account the intended practical paradigm of proof of work. In a proof-of-work mechanism, all three properties are achieved because they exist simultaneously, and the more transactions there are on the network, the more decentralized and secure the mechanism becomes.
Proof-of-work blockchains are designed to achieve scalability while ensuring security and interoperability to enhance and potentially replace traditional value exchanges. By scaling a proof-of-work blockchain so that a single block can process more transactions per second, energy consumption can be significantly reduced by default.
Therefore, the idea that simply changing the consensus mechanism will automatically provide a more sustainable, economical, and scalable protocol than proof-of-work is baseless.
Blockchain governance and doing the right thing
At present, regulators in the European Union and the United States hope to integrate technologies such as blockchain with their climate goals, so the supervision of technologies such as blockchain is particularly important.
The BSV Blockchain Association supports regulation and therefore operates in the spirit of technology neutrality and takes into account: (1) objective technical facts, (2) the energy efficiency of scaling an environmentally friendly proof-of-work protocol like the BSV Blockchain , and (3) the cost efficiencies achieved in high-throughput operations, we argue that there is a need to establish unbiased benchmarks and objective criteria in any studies introduced by regulators to assess the environmental impact of different distributed ledger schemes. .