There is also a lot of waste when mining gold and other metals[1] but nobody cares because gold and other metals have value in conducting electricity and heat and they are used in number of industries and in electronics.
Bitcoin is digital commodity which conducts information and is used in order to enable decentralized communication.
Bitcoin's uptime[2] is 99.99%, now compare that to centralized software applications and you will be in a better understanding on why Bitcoin is valuable.
Take a look at Turing Award winner Silvio Micali's talk on the Algorand proof-of-stake protocol, and you will have a better understanding of why Bitcoin is needlessly wasteful:
So Satoshi didn't know what he, she or they were doing? Ethereum has proof of stake algorithm and we shall see how will it work in the long term.
Btw some people said me here on HN that PoS is the evolution of crypto coins but I think the original design and protocol of Bitcoin is still superior if done right. Just like TCP is still viable to this day although it is almost 50 years old.
Bitcoin is digital commodity which conducts information and is used in order to enable decentralized communication.
Bitcoin's uptime[2] is 99.99%, now compare that to centralized software applications and you will be in a better understanding on why Bitcoin is valuable.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/05/new-study-estimates-...
[2] https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-uptime/