Can't we come up with puzzles where at least something of value is created when the puzzle is solved (and a tremendous amount of resources is not wasted)?
The use of the word “we” is curious. You didn’t come up with the puzzle, you didn’t “waste” the resources. The purpose of the we is to appoint yourself judge and arbiter and to steal yourself into the in-group. Just post your judgement: you don’t like that someone else did something you don’t like with their resources.
At the risk of sounding snarky: It wasn’t. It does however, answer the question. “We” do not need to change our allocation strategy whatsoever because “we” didn’t allocate any resources towards this and “we” aren’t the arbiter of what others can or cannot do with their resources.
We can and do, all the time. And all puzzles are a "waste of resources", really.
I'm not into crypto and I do think Bitcoin is stupid and wasteful, but I don't find it "sick" or all what upsetting that this kind of puzzle exists, though I think some smart contract-based Ethereum puzzles could be much more interesting, demanding solutions to more interesting problems that don't directly relate to the blockchain itself. Imagine a smart contract with a pot anybody can pay into that pays out to whoever could crack a particular previously unsolvable problem. Basically a public bounty. The only downside is that it has to be a problem that can be validated algorithmically.
Why should “we”? You can hear “we should/must” from all corners here but then remember it’s an US start-up’ers forum with people who plan morning meetings for email regexps.
Bitcoin may be an inefficiency, but is it the? Most everyday things modern first-world people do are equivalent to burning oil and shredding trees for little to no reason. You just can’t see it as clearly as in PoW crypto.
> puzzles where at least something of value is created when the puzzle is solved
What puzzles create something of value when they're solved today? A puzzle is typically a thing you do for fun and entertainment, not something you try to solve for the purpose of creating value.
I guess you're thinking more about logic/mathematical puzzles and alike? Would make sense in that case, but that's not the only type of puzzle.
That wouldn't be a puzzle, then. It would some kind of engineering challenge. A puzzle starts by knowing the answer and then putting some circuitous path between it and the player, that they have to figure out how to navigate. It's inherently wasteful to construct puzzles.
The sibling comments are all correct that you're special-pleading the criterion that a puzzle create something of value.
But, as it happens, this one does: it offers economic incentive to develop more efficient attacks on elliptic curves. The curve Bitcoin uses isn't widely used outside of it, but that doesn't mean that an efficient attack on Secp256k1 wouldn't apply elsewhere.
Is this modest as positive externalities go? Probably yes. Could someone with a better attack on the curve just empty wallets? Not necessarily, and probably not: the point of the puzzle is that the entropy has been deliberately reduced to make it crackable with brute force, so, say someone worked out a factor of four improvement: that isn't going to get you into the Genesis Wallet, but it substantially lowers the price of claiming some of the puzzles.
Also, being a cryptographer and being a thief are unrelated professions. Some people might be inclined to both, but I would guess that most are not.
