Thread by @neutronsNeurons

Been catching up on @naval's tweets over the last few days which got me thinking about Proof of Work and everywhere it shows up *outside* crypto.

Turns out it shows up a lot. The more you think about, it the more places you notice it.

Tweetstorm 👇

1/ Physical beauty is nature's PoW. Expensive to manufacture, cheap to verify.

A symmetric flower is hard to grow and sustain under influence of rain, wind, etc. But checking flower symmetry is a low cost op to the kinds of neural nets that process visual inputs in animals.

2/ Professional networking is PoW too.

Sure it's about getting to know someone, but mostly connecting to person X is just a cheaply verifiable way of signalling I have enough money/power/influence/hustle that I was able to connect to person X

3/ University education is PoW.

Yes it has other value too, but if "I deferred my entry into the workforce by 4 years for this credential" doesn't say PoW, I don't know what does

(It's possible to "complete" most MOOCs with minimal work, so credentialing signal is lower there.)

4/ Yeah... you get it. Anything that's resource intensive to make/obtain, but cheap & accurate to check, can make for a good PoW signal.

Now here's the fun part...

5/ What happens when you take a system based on PoW, and eliminate all the work from it?

6/ Answer: volumes rise - but quality craters

Just ask Tinder, Indeed, LinkedIn. Swiping, applying, and connecting are low commitment actions that don't mean much. High volumes - but no PoW.

7/ When marginal cost of interaction drops to zero, PoW disappears along with it. This is why most zero marg cost networking apps are filled with spam: messaging became too cheap.

While in olden times, just receiving a paper letter was a form of PoW

7*/ (It's also the reason why the correct solution to "I only meet uninteresting people on Tinder" is: "You need to make yourself into a more interesting person on Tinder.")

Provide your PoW - and quality increases like magic

8/ Here's a hypothesis: apps and services that eliminate marginal cost of outreach (dating, networking, job applications) will *always* degrade in quality without a PoW mechanism.

Because PoW is the irreducible price of trust - and by extension, of quality - on a network.

9/ If that hypothesis is true, then vast riches await those who restore PoW to its proper place in dating, social, and professional interactions on the Internet.

10/ So: Folks talk a lot about how PoW in crypto consumes vast amounts of energy - and they're right.

But I really wonder how much energy we spend on PoW everywhere else. I've got a hunch it dwarfs crypto

11/ In fact I wouldn't be surprised if a significant fraction of all the energy we expend - at civilizational scale - was some form of PoW.

But when you see blockchain PoW energy by the numbers, it sure looks shocking by itself

A long tweetstorm is proof of work too, I guess 🙂