If you pan for gold and don't find any, that energy is wasted, not converted. So what? The initial claim wasn't "This facet of mining cryptocurrency is like gold" it was "The energy used is converted". It's not. It's burned.
>> Scarecity is driven by an inability to readily harvest/create something.
Cryptocurrency scarcity is artificial, and not driven by anything other than predefined scarcity curves. Even if two guys with CPU-only miners were the entire BTC network, scarcity would be the same, but energy output would be vastly lower.
The busy-work that is done for (say) BTC is only necessary because of the aversion to central currency authority in certain subsections of society. It's an artifact of that ideology.
If you pan for gold and don't find any, that energy is wasted, not converted. So what? The initial claim wasn't "This facet of mining cryptocurrency is like gold" it was "The energy used is converted". It's not. It's burned.
>> Scarecity is driven by an inability to readily harvest/create something.
Cryptocurrency scarcity is artificial, and not driven by anything other than predefined scarcity curves. Even if two guys with CPU-only miners were the entire BTC network, scarcity would be the same, but energy output would be vastly lower.
The busy-work that is done for (say) BTC is only necessary because of the aversion to central currency authority in certain subsections of society. It's an artifact of that ideology.