As long as the price of bitcoin is higher than the expense of mining it then PoW is not a waste in economic terms.
But only if the expense of mining it is considered to include externalities. If you include those, then this is perhaps true, but it means we can’t reject the premise “PoW is a massive waste of resources” offhand. To reject that we’d need to further establish that the miners’ surplus is larger than the externalities. And I note that if the miners’ surplus is large, more miners can join, though there are complications in this argument.
But only if the expense of mining it is considered to include externalities. If you include those, then this is perhaps true, but it means we can’t reject the premise “PoW is a massive waste of resources” offhand. To reject that we’d need to further establish that the miners’ surplus is larger than the externalities. And I note that if the miners’ surplus is large, more miners can join, though there are complications in this argument.
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