/biz/ - Business & Finance

>>51254820
The energy is used to:
* secure the validity of present modifications to the ledger through unforgeable costliness of block creation
* secure the validity of the past transactions on the ledger as each block references and attests to a previous block
* secure the credibility of the distribution of a new currency by using claims of energy that a receipt for receiving newly minted bitcoin. This is the only way a new currency can be initially distributed without a central party as energy is distributed around the world.
* secure the credibility of the monetary policy by building a decentralised arrow of time that is anchored to the real world via the difficulty adjustment. This arrow of time is used for decentralised timekeeping within the system (eg. halvening schedule, difficulty adjustment window, time-locked contracts, hashed time-locked contracts used for the lightning network, descreet log contracts ...).

It is impossible to do anything of theses things in a decentralised way without a claim on energy. Bitcoin bids for cheap energy in the same way the US government bids for energy to fuel its aircraft carriers but is does so without being dependent on any particular type of energy, weather the energy is intermittent or reliability, weather the energy is at the bottom of the ocean or at the top of a volcano, Bitcoin doesn't care. Bitcoin bids for absolute Joules and so will be able to spend a lot less than the US in order to achieve the same level of security.

There is no second best.