Yeah, I think that was their plan, to make it based on the fees, which you can already bump to prioritise your transaction getting picked up from the mempool.
But the idea is with scarcity, the price increases. If it costs $100,000 to mine 1 BTC, you better hope 1 BTC is worth more than $100,000, or nobody will do it. But if they don't do it, the hash difficulty drops, so it costs less to mine. It's a weird system in constant tension.
If someone could invent a "proof of
useful work", it would be amazing, and none of the energy would be "wasted', but unfortunately, the work has to be hard to do, but easy to verify.
If you have to fold the protein a second time to prove the first one was right, it's no good with this system. Maybe if it was consensus-based and multiple people had to get the same result, but it would be so easy to just lie about what result you got and do a 51% attack.
Quote from Aurum KodEXo
It will still be mineable, it just will be in minuscule amount gotten from transaction fees.
