It's for nothing as in, energy is consumed and nothing of value to society is produced. When a bank uses energy to run its services, those computers actually achieve something (like, for instance, managing to process more than a handful of transactions per second). Bitcoin's 'proof of work' is just a very complicated heating system. You are literally going through the whole rigmarole just to increase the entropy of the universe. Considering the effort we are putting in to squeeze more efficiency out of everything from washing machines to jumbo jets, this is kind of waste is pretty shocking.

Nothing of value? For real? Currency and a means of transacting it is produced. Being able to move your wealth outside of China is produced.

> If it would require no energy to create Bitcoin it would be completely useless.

Why would an alternative consensus mechanism that doesn't involve finding a low target hash make it useless?

Yeah, isn't the heavy computational work what's provide value and security to the blockchain?

The parent commenter literally discounted your 'even more green' argument in his comment but you still made it as a rebuttal? Ye gods.