[Squithrilve]

> SSL provides a service that is immediately valuable to all parties.

And Bitcoin does not provide service that is valuable to all parties?

> Bitcoin mining is done by people who want to get rich by not doing anything.

Calculating SHA256 is hardly anything because we wouldn't be arguing about that, right?

> What if Bitcoin were to fail for some reason?

You're not concerned about SSL failing for some reason? Heartbleed?

> What if Bitcoin were to fail for some reason?

That's highly speculative. Besides Ethereum has several failures already and it's still doing fine because there are serveral mechanisms that can be used to resolve such problem (e.g. hardforks).