I don't think one could claim mining bitcoin is the killer app of bitcoin. That's a reason why people would support bitcoin.
The killer app is the combination of economics, sociology, game theory and decentralized ledger blah blah blah
When you take one currency pair with 8 digits of precision that’s PROGRAMMED to deflate and trade that against an inflating currency with 2 digits of precision...
You’re going to need a whole lot of the inflating thing to buy the deflating thing, this is math.
Me personally, my electrical bills and the costs I’ve eaten has yielded tremendous value: for me. I mined, I was rewarded, I stimulated the economy.
Long before there was an economy.
I've never used a darknet market.
I read an article on slashdot in 2011 called "Bitcoin Mining for fun and profit" I bought a graphics card, it paid itself off in 21 days.
I bought 12 more graphics cards and sucked down 3kW for 24 months.
I do not regret this and every single person here that doesn't understand proof of work, doesn't understand a deflating asset with 8 (10 million) decimal places of trading precision against fiat currencies with only 2 decimal places...
Well I can't help people on the internet do math and make money, no one pays me to do that.