[thereisnospork]

> it's not clear that we should be paying people to burn energy to crack hashes.

In particular when we artificially increase the energy require to crack said hashes. If hash-cracking was, for instance, bid out on a competitive marketplace[0] instead of limited by difficulty bitcoin would need far less power to perform its 'role' as a 'currency'.

[0]Want to mine a block? Bid for the mining rights (in USD or BTC).

[randomNumber7]

The point of bitcoin is, that you would need to burn the same amount of energy to fake the blockchain.

Im not saying this is good, but its the way it works...