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.