Try responding to the most charitable interpretation of others' comments. It's clear that nerdponx is referring to the same thing that jsmthrowaway went into greater detail about.

Try this as a habit: If in response to something someone else has said, you find yourself thinking, "That would be ridiculous! Who would think that?", then follow up by answering your own question: "That would be ridiculous, so the person I'm responding to probably doesn't think that."

Pondering how ridiculous it would be for you to choose to believe that someone else actually believed the first ridiculous thing is an exercise you can pursue at your own option.

While I grant that you may be correct in this case, this isn't a tenable position to take in general. An overwhelming amount of people do believe patently ridiculous things, and frequently talks about them as if they make sense.

I would agree with you if this conversation were taking place anywhere other than HN. This community isn't infallible, but I argue that the level of discourse here is far above the mean.

No, I actually agree with the person. Cryptocurrency is horrendously wasteful. But that person ignored what I said because that's not what I was discussing. That's the straw man argument I mentioned.

How am I building a strawman? I didn’t ignore anything you said; I’m responding directly to it. The computation does nothing. Until the brute force finds a hash that meets difficulty, it’s computing literally nothing of value. That’s computation and energy we do not get back. You’re not folding proteins, you’re not rendering climatological models, you’re not training machine learning. You are hashing, then throwing it away. It’s a “nope, not it, next.” There is no measurable value until by chance you find one, then the energy you threw away getting there gains value in that you threw it away. Millions and millions of watts of absolutely zero computation of benefit to humanity.

Yes, the end result is a secured ledger. The path to that secured ledger is entirely wasted computing. Bitcoin is wasteful solely based on this fact. How can you consider Bitcoin wasteful as I do and also claim people who point this flaw out are naysayers who don’t get it? Your argument makes no sense.

> . Until the brute force finds a hash that meets difficulty, it’s computing literally nothing of value

It's not doing nothing. It's searching - searching for a hash that can be used to protect the ledger from attacks.

Saying it's doing nothing is like saying Dijkstra's algorithm is doing nothing until it finally finds the shortest path. That's just plain wrong. Sorry.