22 min readDec 25, 2019--Press enter or click to view image in full sizeAlmost since the dawn of Bitcoin, there has been a hot debate over the value of Proof-of-Work in cryptocurrency systems, and whereby the apparent wasteful use of energy by Bitcoin to secure its system will one day destroy the Earth. Unfortunately, there still remains a basic misunderstanding of the value of this Proof-of-Work, and the fundamental relationship to energy and work that makes up any and every system in the known universe.One of the least understood and oft-cited technologies of this crazy universe is the emergent complex system called Bitcoin, and thus by extension, the intrinsically linked Proof-of-Work that drives the engine under its hood, metabolising raw energy as its life force.There are many ways to describe Bitcoin the system, bitcoin the product, and the relationship to the underlying Proof-of-Work, but an overview of how the Bitcoin system functions at a high level is;“The network timestamps transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain of hash-based proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed without redoing the proof-of-work. The longest chain not only serves as proof of the sequence of events witnessed, but proof that it came from the largest pool of CPU power.”- Satoshi Nakamoto, The Bitcoin WhitepaperThe idea of Bitcoin was to create a reliable, decentralised network, upon which all transactions could be recorded & stored, that was able to be validated by anyone. The issue was: how do you manage a ledger of transactions amongst a globally distributed database, entirely without a central point of failure, with a set of users who may or may not be known to each other, in a potentially adversarial environment, all the while ensuring that consensus is practically always achieved?The answer to this equation fundamentally lies in a unique method of solving the “Byzantine Generals Problem”, a thought experiment proposed while designing fault-tolerant consensu