Blockchain Developer's Guide

Hashing outside PoW

Aside from proof of work, PoS and DPoS also make use of hashes, and largely for the same purpose. Plenty of discussions have been dedicated to whether PoS will replace PoW and prevent us from running thousands of computers doing megawatts' worth of tedious hashing with enormous carbon footprints.

PoW systems seem to persist in spite of the power consumption and environmental impact of reasonably difficult hashing operations. Arguably, the reason for this is the very simple economics: miners have an incentive to validate transactions by computing hashes because they receive a share of new tokens minted into the system. More complex tokenomics schemes for proof of stake or distributed proof of stake often fail the smell ...