I'll give you that this is the single most plausible account of what kind of product blockchain technology actually provides. But at the same time, taking this

I'll give you that this is the single most plausible account of what kind of product blockchain technology actually provides. But at the same time, taking this as a given, that's even more fatal than my claim as to its uselessness. The product is to impose a verifiable energy cost on computation on a counter-party to one (of many) mass communication (etc.) services for the sake of "kinda, maybe, roughly" improving the net quality of that service. It reads to me like Herbal Life's vitamin supplements being discovered to cause cancer. I don't mind YT requiring it's users to spend $0.1 in energy to upload a video -- in principle it's a neat form of "hidden taxation" that manages to target "the right people". In practice it seems a collective-action failure with a high probability of bad negative externalities (ie., spammers siphoning off cheap energy causing a delay in green transition) which is better solved thru the usual mechanism of collective action: institutions, laws, etc. and attenuitive systems (spam checkers etc).