The 'end' is the security of the bitcoin blockchain. Defence forces consume a massive amount of energy and human resources. They are still funded because countries don't all trust each other and they want security. An alternative to Proof of Work such as Proof of Stake would be like a country having a nuclear arsenal, allowing it to cut back on military spending. The problem seems to be that the incentives are on the miners to switch to another proof system, and the existing miners wouldn't want to do that because it's their edge in the market (low electricity costs).

You're talking about the means of blockchain to self-preservation; I'm saying that we don't need blockchain, that it eats way too much for the fun it provides, so we should just kill it off and call it a day.

> The 'end' is the security of the bitcoin blockchain. Defence forces consume a massive amount of energy and human resources. They are still funded because countries don't all trust each other and they want security.

Yes. Wasteful as evil as the concept of a military is, countries need military forces to maintain peace, by keeping each other in check. It's an unfortunate direct consequence of the way humans organize themselves into societies.

But blockchain is not a direct consequence of a fundamental issue in human organization process (if anything, it's just a direct consequence of human greed meeting 2010s tech). It's the least efficient way of doing anything, because it completely eschews the need to trust other actors. Yes, I believe trustless systems are mostly a bad thing, because trust is literally the efficiency hack that allows us to coordinate at scale.

There are probably some theoretical problems where a trustless solution is perfect. But as it is today, the blockchain is trying to turn everything in the society into a Cold War-like military spending problem to avoid having to trust one another, even though trust-based systems work just fine.

Proof of Stake (PoS) and Proof of Capacity (PoC) exist and are actually deployed for quite a while now. They don't consume lots of electricity and can be runned on cheap hardware.

I run 2 PoS wallets on one of my computers. It doesn't affect it much, though not all coins are equal (some consume more resources). It just have to stay on.