I'm only interested in bitcoin, but to say it wastes power would be extremely misguided. 1. The energy (work) the miners put into mining is fundamental to any

I'm only interested in bitcoin, but to say it wastes power would be extremely misguided. 1. The energy (work) the miners put into mining is fundamental to any sound money: it's proof of work. This is ultimately what money is (or should be). Take a look a gold - in order to mine gold, on average you have to put in work of equivalent economic value to the gold you find. This is fundamental to a fair society. With fiat currencies, a few select people are allowed to create trillions of $ at a few key strokes, it's value sucked out of the existing dollars (i.e. the ones in your bank account, wages, pension) and then charge interest on it as if it was their own. The is the root of many of the problems we're seeing today: wars, cost-of-living, growing divide between the super-rich and everyone else. Central banking truly is a cancer on the world, one who's ultimate end is to enslave its population. 2. The bitcoin miners are heavily incentivised to use the cheapest energy they can find, and they're - and this is very important to understand - not geographically constrained, unlike almost any other user of energy. This means that they will naturally disperse to locations where there is energy that no one else wants (i.e. otherwise wasted energy), in order to be viable. Bitcoin allows people to escape the enslavement of central banking-orientated societies. In order to understand how important and useful it is, you need to see the problem that it's fixing, and while people look through the lens of the dollar they only see real-estate, stock-market, food etc. prices going up, rather than the value of their dollars going down, and to whom that value is being stealthily transferred to.