The growing influence of Bitcoin in the world has attracted more and more supporters. But at the same time, criticism against Bitcoin has never stopped. Many people disapprove Bitcoin because they believe Bitcoin mining wastes too much energy, esp, electricity, whereas Bitcoin itself does not create any value.

As far as I'm concerned, the POW model in Bitcoin mining is definitely not a waste of energy, but instead a storage of energy and value. That is the basis of the value of Bitcoin and the existence of Bitcoin.

Ethereum has initially formed a complete ecology in the past five to six years, yet it didn't manage to withstand the pressure of all parties, finally choosing to convert the consensus mechanism from POW to POS and leaving Bitcoin the only one that sticks to POW. POW consumes energy on the surface, but in essence it stores energy and value. Now, let’s interpret the process from the perspective of physics. To begin with, the first law of thermodynamics.

That law refers to energy protection and transformation in the field of thermal phenomena. It reflects the conservation of different forms of energy during transformation and conversion. The concrete expression is: the increase in the internal energy of an object is equal to the amount of heat absorbed by the object and the work imposed on the object. That is, heat can be transferred from one problem to another stage, or it can be converted into mechanical energy or other energies, but during that process, the total volume of energy remains unchanged. Its extension and essence is the famous "law of conservation of energy".

The law of conservation of energy is one of the basic laws in nature. It is generally expressed like this: energy neither emerges out of the void nor disappears from nowhere. It only transforms from one form to another, or from one object to another, while the total amount always remains the same. If a system is in isolation, then it is impossible for energy or mass to pass into or out of the system. In this case, the law of conservation of energy is that the total energy of the isolated system stays fixed.

In terms of time, space, matter and energy, human beings know a lot about energy, but also very little. Energy seems very mysterious, it's about the transformation of material movement. Everything in the world is in constant motion. Among all the attributes of matter, movement is the most basic one, and others are all the specific manifestations. Energy exists in diverse forms. According to the forms of movement, energy can be divided into electrical energy, nuclear energy, mechanical energy, chemical energy, thermal energy, radiation energy, light energy, biological energy, etc. These different forms of energy can be converted into each other through physical effects or chemical reactions.

About energy, what mankind can do now is to continuously transform the energy in nature into energy that can be used by mankind through technology and into the momentum for the development of human society. In daily lives, oil and electricity impress us most. We refuel cars every day, turning the energy contained in the oil into the energy for running cars. We use electricity all the time to supply the normal operation of the entire human civilization. But electricity does not come out of the blue, but from the transformation of hydropower, wind energy, coal, oil, etc. Water and food supplement the energy humans need, otherwise death comes. 

Bitcoin mining we are currently conducting is essentially a process of energy conversion. Firstly, water energy, wind energy, solar energy, geothermal energy and so on are converted into electrical energy that mining machines need to participate in hash calculation, which forms computing power, entering the accounting work of Bitcoin, and then obtaining the Bitcoin reward. In the end, the energy of nature is stored in the form of Bitcoin, that is, the value is stored. Bitcoin mining is not free, it has cost, it needs to consume physical mining machines, it needs to consume energy. The energy consumption process is the process of energy transmission, being converted into stored Bitcoin, which happens to be the value support of Bitcoin. Based on this, no other cryptocurrency can replace Bitcoin.

What do you think?