I think it's for the same reasons we tend to abstract currencies away from their underpinning scarce resources. Convenience, scale, efficiency. Most mining dev

I think it's for the same reasons we tend to abstract currencies away from their underpinning scarce resources. Convenience, scale, efficiency. Most mining devices don't actually ever successfully win a single bitcoin. But they get paid pro rata for their contribution to the combined hashing power, which did. For miners in a pool hashing power is the saleable commodity. Perhaps this was the point you were making. Even if it didn't fulfill its potential (yet), we must remember what made bitcoin so special: eliminating the double-spend and central authority problems. How do you intend to sell your sequestered CO2 and prove that it's still yours to sell? This is all hypothetical anyway. To my knowledge there's no scheme that satisfies those criteria wrt proof of sequestration.