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by lkdjjdjjjdskjd 2743 days ago
Seriously? Are you sure they are worst "wasters" of energy on the planet right now? What about cars, and eating meat, and Christmas lights, and so on? Have you checked your own energy consumption today?
2 comments

Not "worst" just "egregious". You made a strawman, down-votes incoming.
I had to look up "egregious", and as a foreign speaker, I am afraid I don't see a significant difference to "worst".

The argument made was that time travelers would go through the effort to punish miners, of all people.

There is a lot of other senseless wasting of energy going on theses days.

All these things get something in return. For all thats been spent on mining, we are getting 7 transactions per second in exchange. It is absurd.
While I agree with you, especially with the benefit of the hindsight, I used to spend many CPU cycles on SETI, looking for freaking aliens.

It's pretty hard to objectively judge what's a waste of energy.

My biggest concern is that a lot of crypto mining was and still is coal powered. I'd probably care less if it was all solar powered.

It seems to work well enough for at least some use cases, no matter how low the number of transactions. Further developments like Lightning Network are being worked on to enable other use cases.

I don't like if they burn coal for it, but there are also other energy sources, sometimes there is even spare energy that needs to be used somehow.