[codyb]

Well... I'd say we've got a long ways to go before an extremely volatile transaction rate limited currency which can't be exchanged at the vast majority of businesses primarily measured based on it's exchange rate with the USD is a viable alternative to the USD ;-). Especially when it's currently consuming about a power plants output worth of electricity to perform primarily meaningless hash calculations in a world where many people don't even have electricity and electricity use is killing our planet.

Things like power outages making it impossible to perform transactions (although for some people that'd be true with credit cards) is another big issue.

Not that there's not a lot of neat stuff to the block chain and crypto currencies, and I think ethereum is really neat. I'm not anti cryptocurrency, but I'd say it remains to be seen if it's a viable alternative to fiat currencies.

[Capt-RogerOver]

A bit off-topic perhaps, but you misunderstand the purpose of mining (hash calculations). They are not meaningless by any measure. Calculating hashes is required for the network to prevent double-spends. There is no other known technology that can do the same thing in a distributed network. This property of the network (it being distributed), along with the basic functionality of a currency has obviously been valued by the market. This means that there are people out there who gain from using it. This means that calculating hashes is valuable and has utility for people. The way that utility is implemented is just a technical design question.

If your statement was correct, one could easily extend it and say that Internet is consuming a whole lot of power for the meaningless purpose of powering the switches and routers that make up the backbone of the network. That all that energy goes to waste to have some machines standing somewhere in a datacenter that noone sees.

Obviously, those machines transform the energy into practical utility, and so do ASICs calculating Bitcoin hashes.