Quote from: Satoshi Nakamoto on January 25, 2009, 3:47:10 PM UTCQuote from: Hal Finney on January 24, 2009, 4:48:03 PM UTCIf POW tokens do become useful, and especially if they become money, machines will no longer sit idle. Users will expect their computers to be earning them money (assuming the reward is greater than the cost to operate).
Computers are already designed to consume much less electricity when idle than when running full tilt. This trend will continue and extend; some modern chips throttle down to zero MHz and virtually zero watts at idle, waking automatically at the next interrupt.
The last thing we need is to deploy a system designed to burn all available cycles, consuming electricity and generating carbon dioxide, all over the Internet, in order to produce small amounts of bitbux to get emails or spams through.
Richard Clayton and I claim that PoW doesn’t work:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/proofwork.pdf