[_zeo8]

> The energy here is wasted because Bitcoin does almost nothing of value.

You can also argue that mining gold is a waste of resources because gold does almost nothing of value.

> Yes, there are other uses for Bitcoin. They are miniscule in comparison to its use as an investment product.

What about gold? Aren't its uses minuscule in comparision to its speculative investment value?

The point is: The market decides. One can argue that Bitcoin characteristics (encrypted, pseudo-anonymous, open source, decentralized, global, scalable, deflationary, stateless, etc.) justify its speculative price.

[PeterisP]

We're not spending country-scale amounts of power or resources to mine gold, that's a comparably small industry. That is the point, it's so out of proportion to allocate so much resources to simply validating transactions.