Well it’s waste in the sense that you are spending lots of energy to calculate magic numbers, which don’t have any other value except to prove you own bitcoin. It is or is very near a tautology.
In contrast to energy credits in scifi which is something like a promise to deliver a fixed amount of energy, like how a dollar used to have an equivalence in gold.
Like, do you imagine some future spacefaring civilization going around and blowing up stars in order to calculate hashes for their currency? I can, but really only as something that an evil civilization or runaway automation would do.
Why not build a dyson sphere and sell contracts on the energy instead, to people who will use it to be productive? Why is it better to burn all stored energy you can find off as quickly as possible to generate numbers you don’t otherwise need?
As long as humanity is divided and has factions that are in conflict, something like proof of work can be useful, because it allows those that are in conflict or don’t trust each other, to maintain a shared view of an accounting system (Bitcoin). When we pass that stage of bickering apes we won’t need Bitcoin anymore.
> because it allows those that are in conflict or don’t trust each other,
People use this argument a lot, and I don't get it. You're trusting that miners don't perform a 51% attack; you're trusting that the underlying crypto doesn't have shortcuts; you're trusting the wallet software. Some of these things are unverifiable, leaving you only with trust.
I don't agree; for most computing tasks, the result of every computation produced by each node is used. In Bitcoin, only the "winner" for each particular block gets their computation result used, everyone else literally throws their results away.
Tautological. This is essentially: “It’s only waste in so far as you consider it waste”
However the real point about bitcoin is it’s efficiency decreases as adoption or speculation increases, whereas another use of computation such as say Google search this is not the case and they are actively trying to make it more efficient.
