The irony is only there if you look at the tree instead of the whole forest. That's like looking at one human in a deserted island and criticizing humanity for

The irony is only there if you look at the tree instead of the whole forest. That's like looking at one human in a deserted island and criticizing humanity for being useless. That same human, working in cooperation with other humans could be capable of walking on the moon. But even then, there would be some snarky comment on HN criticizing the un-productiveness of humans walking on the moon. This is a cool project that shows how far we've come. The Bitcoin network (wasteful or not) is currently capable of calculating 74.5 exahashes per second. You would need 10x74.5x10^18 Apollo Guidance Computers for that, you would probably need to build the equivalent of the Death Star to fit them all in the same place.