The only thing people are actually using Bitcoin for right now is to sell to other people for more than they bought it (or maybe to sell for less than they bought it to launder money).
The total amount made by the buyers and sellers is zero (because every buyer is buying from a seller), and there has to be a constant inflow of new buyers just to cover the cost of the hardware and power.
But they have utility. At this point I think mostly for gamblers and criminals as you said yourself.
But they also have utility for all sorts of tinkerers, and via that route they may eventually become more useful to the rest of us.
The real problem is the associated upkeep. If it were to get comparable in use with fiat, I believe Bitcoin would quite literally cook us all on this planet. The energy characteristics of crypto are unbounded from top, and this is seen as a feature - unlike normal financial systems, which try to minimize it.
Proof of work is not a per transaction cost. It's a per block cost that doesn't depend on the number of transactions per block or the size of the block.
But still, the way the incentives are structured in this whole game seems somewhat perverse. Otherwise we would never have gotten to a point where bitcoin mining has a country sized energy profile.
It will make sense to you in 5 years.
How did the family get the capital asset of an antminer in the first place? How are they paying for electricity?
How is this sustainable? Why is a random family able to compete with businesses that have real economy of scale, rather than having their margin driven to zero?
https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins/VEF (example of local trading)
Remittances, family abroad (easy via BTC to circumvent restrictions). Bitcoin is stable compared to a hyper inflation of +2,616%.
The hard problem that the mining algorithm computes is a Hash of a batch of transactions together with some meta data. This meta data also includes the Hash of the previous batch. This is creating a cryptographic chain of transaction batches (blocks). A Blockchain.
This is securing the transactions in the following way:
- You can not change a transaction without changing the hash of the batch the transaction was included in.
- This would also change the hash of all transaction batches that follow.
- The crypto currency miners and users follow the longest chain with the most work put into.
- To fake or alter a Transaction you would need to recalculate the hashes of the blocks that follow faster then the honest miners so that your new chain is the longest chain.
- More honest miners means it is harder to manipulate the blockchain since to do that you would need to control more then 51% of the global hash power of this currency.
Securing a Blockchain is not as noble of an effort then curing cancer with Folding@Home, but it is also not just wasting electricity.
The value in proving some amount of work was done is that it’s a mechanism for defeating fraud.
And in this case, trust seems to be the underlying commodity.
Why is that proof of work of any value, to anyone?
Hard work, just for the sake of hard work, is a great ideal to the the previous generations - but we traditionally have based our economy on how much your work benefits someone, not how hard you worked.
Mining bitcoin is extremely hard, with precisely zero benefit. The only thing of value is the work itself. Quite zen, even.
You’re making it sound like you genuinely don’t understand proof of work. Proof of work is the reason that it is effectively impossible to fraudulently alter Bitcoin transactions. Again, it’s fine if you don’t care about that because you don’t see any value in those transactions, but surely you recognize the huge importance of preventing the modification of previous transactions in any sort of payment system.
It isn't proof: you could have used a digger. The point of Bitcoin-style proof-of-work is that everyone has to use a teaspoon, and if you want to 'go back in time' and rewrite transactions you have to do more work with a teaspoon than everyone else is doing.
Someone™ is paying good greenbacks for irrefutable proof of me wasting kilowatts. The more I try to understand that part of the crypto value chain, the more bizarre it seems. "It's a store of value", i.e. Salon.com can later pay someone else with the same "proof of wasted cpu cycles"? What?!