[ben_w]

Eh, I’ve had responses from pro-crypto people to the effect that the cost is the point, those particular individuals seem to believe that is both a necessary and a sufficient way of making the thing secure and useful.

I was unable to convince them to the contrary on either regard, the necessity nor the sufficiency, despite the existence of all the currencies that work even better without PoW/PoS.

[woodruffw]

That's the wonderful(?) thing about profit motive: Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) are making a handful of people ludicrous amounts of money, and it's easy to ignore just about anything that falls out of that as long as the gears keep turning.

When people succumb to that kind of profit motive, it becomes our responsibility as disinterested outsiders to make a non-compromised evaluation of the state of affairs. That's the evaluation I'm interested in.