Cypherpunk Beginnings and the Case for Proof of Work with Bob Summerwill

With Ethereum's transition to Proof of Stake there is a common mainstream perception that Proof of Work is an ""old technology"" with no redeeming merits, forever assigned to the dustbin of history with The Merge. I would like to take the audience back to the very beginnings of the blockchain revolution. Back to Bitcoin basics and cypher-punk origins. How did we get to where we are? As part of that, the speaker will enumerate the ways in which POW and POS are similar and dissimilar, and ways in which POW is superior to POS systems. It is likely that many people in the blockchain ecosystem in 2022 were not around in this early phase and might never have heard some of these origin stories. People who might never have considered Bitcoin to have any merits over Ethereum. This will be a devil's advocate talk which should be intellectually stimulating and an interesting counterpoint to accepted mainstream positions on POW and POS.