I understand exactly what crypto-currencies are.

'Mining' does not give them 'legitimacy', it's just an odd by-product of how some of them are structured.

And frankly - that 'mining' consumers power and resources is a total waste. There could very well be other, less wasteful ways accomplish the same thing.

Certainly 'Kin' is not 'mined' - they just arbitrarily create and dump them as they please.

>'mining' consumers power and resources is a total waste

Driving a cash truck to merchants, to pick up cash, to take back to a bank, to be counted by a physical machine, to update a database in a bank server is also a 'total waste'.

Just because the waste is hidden in the old financial system doesn't mean it's 'less wasteful'

Ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas

If you know of another way to solve the Byzantine generals problem, there's an entire community of researchers waiting to read your paper.

Another angle of criticism would be that solving the Byzantine generals problem with the threat model that cryptocurrencies target (i.e. anyone can join and leave the network somewhat anonymously at any time) is simply not necessary in the real world unless you are a die hard anarchist. Therefore, for any application that doesn't have those requirements it is a huge waste of resources.

"If you know of another way to solve the Byzantine generals problem"

'Mining' is an arbitrary answer to handing out block-chains.

They could give out Bitcoins to whoever solved specific math problems for which 'computing power' doesn't matter.

They could give new Bitcoins to completely random people.

The 'mining' paradigm is utterly wasteful because it wastes resources for no reason.

The could have issued a 'big block' and than have been 'done with it' - no new Bitcoins.

The level of religious support for this stuff is hilarious.

I'm glad you have outed this rather complex multi billion dollar industry with thousands of extremely competent programmers.

> 'Mining' is an arbitrary answer to handing out block-chains.

No it's not there are many ways to mine a coin and reach consensus, Proof of Work has been the most sensible one - as staking electricity is fundamental and universal.

> They could give out Bitcoins to whoever solved specific math problems for which 'computing power' doesn't matter.

They?

> The 'mining' paradigm is utterly wasteful because it wastes resources for no reason.

Ethereum uses a mining algo to process Smart Contracts. Other currencies like sia, use mining to process decentralised storage. Utterly wasteful is an overstatement. There are plans to move Ethereum to Proof of Stake where mining coins will become incredibly difficult and uneconomic and will reduce the power consumption problem.

> The level of religious support for this stuff is hilarious.

Your poor understanding of the topic made me chuckle

Alexasmyths isn't really making particularly crazy statements there. Ripple is a successful (third in market cap behind only Bitcoin and Ethereum) coin that already works by the "just randomly give them out to people" system without Proof Of Work. Yeah it's not great but neither is using huge amounts of processing power.

The purpose of Mining is not to hand out new coins, this is only done to incentivise mining. The real reason behind mining is to secure the transactions. Mining prevents people from double spending their coins.

You can completely agree with crypto-currencies having value and also believe "There's no net-value created by doing the 'mining part'". The reason is that whatever you gained in BitCoin value you lost in the ability to sell your electricity.

The net value of doing additional mining is that the payment that you accept as a merchant is that much harder to undo by an attacker.

If you accept that a bank vault that has one guard is made more secure by adding another guard you must accept that adding miners to a PoW chain makes it more robust against attackers -- this is the value.