[erikpukinskis]

> So we've created an "industry" where you are essentially paid by comverting energy to waste.

But with Ethereum, it's not waste. The miners are providing storage and compute, a la Amazon Web Services. It's not like Bitcoin, where the hashing is just there to verify the blockchain.

In general, it's a valid concern... Do we really need to compute these things over and over to secure a fixed set of computations?

But in reality, the cryptocomputers that make more efficient use of miners will create more value and associated currencies will be more valuable. Bitcoin is essentially a proof of concept and therefore totally unoptimized.

Eventually the cryptographically verified computing market and the trustful computing market will find the sweet spots between efficiency and redundancy. I'm not generally trusting of the free market, but in this case the free market seems perfectly capable of solving this problem.

[sharpneli]

The proof of work part is separate from running the contracts. So it still stands that the mining is only because it allows us to measure in a provable way that someone has thrown X amount of Joules in the gutters.

[pheldagryph]

Surely some of it is a waste. Even for the latest, hottest cryptocurrency. The question is: how much energy is wasted versus the alternative, and does the utility justify it?

Depending on speculatively large future-values of cryptocurrencies is probably not the right way to evaluate the externalities, here.