I'm glad you have outed this rather complex multi billion dollar industry with thousands of extremely competent programmers. > 'Mining' is an arbitrary answer

I'm glad you have outed this rather complex multi billion dollar industry with thousands of extremely competent programmers. > 'Mining' is an arbitrary answer to handing out block-chains. No it's not there are many ways to mine a coin and reach consensus, Proof of Work has been the most sensible one - as staking electricity is fundamental and universal. > They could give out Bitcoins to whoever solved specific math problems for which 'computing power' doesn't matter. They? > The 'mining' paradigm is utterly wasteful because it wastes resources for no reason. Ethereum uses a mining algo to process Smart Contracts. Other currencies like sia, use mining to process decentralised storage. Utterly wasteful is an overstatement. There are plans to move Ethereum to Proof of Stake where mining coins will become incredibly difficult and uneconomic and will reduce the power consumption problem. > The level of religious support for this stuff is hilarious. Your poor understanding of the topic made me chuckle