Good god did someone drink the kool-aid... please explain succinctly what "problem" is being solved by a handful of wealthy individuals using all of the world's GPU power to mine numbers for mostly unusable currency...
>I suppose that's why it has grown in price in spite of its supply slowly increasing. Because it's unusable!
The fact that the price is consistently increasing is what makes it an unusable currency. A deflationary currency is a useless medium of exchange as any rational actor will not spend it due to the potential future increase in price. I hold multiple crypto assets but I think you have to be kidding yourself if you think that Bitcoin and the like are usable currencies.
> What problems does the Ethereum Virtual Machine solve, as far as turning decentralized network code into a server/computer?
Given that the eth VM uses a fraction of a single percentage of its processing power to run smart contracts (like, 0.00000001%), and the rest in redundantly verifying those transactions, it's not solving any problem of decentralised processing in a useful way.
This article is about making custom purpose silicon only usable for sha256 based proof of work mining, and has nothing to do with GPUs. GPUs have not been profitable to use in bitcoin mining for many years now.
I suppose that's why it has grown in price in spite of its supply slowly increasing. Because it's unusable! (sarcasm)
> "problem" being solved
In essence, it takes scarcity to make scarcity. So, to get digital scarcity, you have to fork over scarce resources.
But I agree with you that the computing cost is excessive, and the reward function was not well calibrated.
On the other hand, the rate of the explosion in price could not have been foreseen.