I heard that too. I believe what Emin meant by no mining is no conventional mining i.e. "brute-force solve a difficult puzzle", it needs far less energy to "interview 5 nodes".
You think he meant that Avalanche would replace hash mining and not just supplement it? I didn't think that was the plan. I would not be in favor of that.
Now that you mentioned it, I think it is just as susceptible to 51% attacks, and such attack may become easier to deploy because participation no longer requires expensive power.
If that's the case, hopefully that is only a minor setback that can be ironed out quickly.
That's my understanding. Satoshi's consensus method relies on whichever chain is the longest, backed by hashing power. Avalanche was depicted as needing no such "enormous energy".
