How does investing engineering effort in designing mining ASICs and spending dollars to purchase what is essentially a currency generating machine help us as a

How does investing engineering effort in designing mining ASICs and spending dollars to purchase what is essentially a currency generating machine help us as a community? It's supposed to help said currency become more solidly established, and therefore more useful to more people. I wish we were just as enthusiastic and race to solve other problems too -- like spreading education, finding out ways to purify water, or maximizing agriculture throughput in famine, or predicting when the next hurricane, tsunami, or earthquake is coming our way. I'm pretty sure people are enthusiastic about those things, and probably quite a lot more people than are into bitcoin. They're just less visible, since those aren't the cool new shiny thing (and aside from the weather/earthquake predictions, they're probably not heavy enough on software to be considered of interest here).