You're right that the specific computation of PoW is supposed to be useless for game theory reasons [0], but the computation requirement itself still delays upd

You're right that the specific computation of PoW is supposed to be useless for game theory reasons [0], but the computation requirement itself still delays updating the network (while block size constrains how many transactions can happen between each block update). It takes time for those updates to get published back across the network. If you drop the computation requirement and move enforcement to validators and slashing you can easily 10x-100x this without off chain layer 2 hacks. I was originally skeptical of this because it gives up the computational security guarantees of PoW in favor of game theory guarantees, but I was ultimately persuaded after reading more about it. I think there's a place for both, digital gold like BTC with very low throughput and slow transactions for holding value and rarely moving currency, and ETH (and tokens backed by ETH's protocol) for everything else. With maybe some special situations for something like Zcash. [0]: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/97030/beginners-question-why-must-proof-of-work-be-useless https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/97030/beginners-...