It's not a moral judgment, it's an economical judgement.
Mining bitcoins costs lots of economic value (energy, hardware, personnel) and produces virtually none. It's extremely uneconomical in the purest sense of the term.
Economic value is not an objective phenomenon. It isn't like mass or energy or charge or fluid flow. It follows no conservation laws.
It's a subjective, often ephemeral phenomenon that emerges from the interactions of buyers and sellers. When I say "x has value y" all I'm saying is that in current market conditions, some human would be willing to sell x at price y and another human would be willing to buy x at price y.
So your statement that bitcoin mining is bad because it "costs value" and doesn't "produce value" is not really meaningful. And even if it were, the simple fact is that bitcoin mining is often profitable, depending on the cost of watts and ASICs.
Economic value is rooted in both perceived and real, non-negotiable needs (water, shelter, food, etc).
Economic idealists tend to skip over the latter, probably because they have never faced poverty.
Rather than unscrambling numbers in pursuit of a diseased fantasy, compute could be put to work solving complex allocation problems, simulations, training, etc. to advance economic efficiency. For food production & distribution, water management, natural disaster mitigation, housing allocation, etc.
Good money is a prerequisite for a functioning economy. The majority of world's countries don't have access to good money, and that's why Bitcoin is really important. It really does provide water, shelter and food to these people.
Mining produces blocks, and miners are rewarded with bitcoin, which have a certain positive value because people want to buy them. The operation generates more value than it consumes, and therefore it is economical.
I bet any argument you could give for that statement could be equally applied to dollars.
Bitcoin is valued because it functions as an [imperfect] form of money. People value it (aka are willing to exchange their dollars for it) because it lets them transact with other people in a way that is, barring massive computational power, immutable and uncensorable, and because it was the first system to do this and therefore has the longest history of transactions. There are plenty of valid criticisms of bitcoin, but it would be idiotic to deny that a currency which functions in this way would be valueless or not in demand. Some people are certainly fools, but nobody has to be a fool in order to explain a world in which bitcoin commands a high price.
What would happen if nobody wanted to buy or receive BTC tomorrow? Some people would be very angry.
Now imagine what would happen if the dollar ceased to have any value? Unimaginable, isn't it? Economies would collapse, the whole world would be in disarray.
Economies wouldn't collapse because people can switch to bitcoin. In free markets, people always try to switch to a stronger currency, when their own currency loses value. Bitcoin is volatile, but it's still better than a currency that loses value in long term.
Recently, the president of Turkey said that they are in war with Bitcoin. This is exactly what happens when cronies manipulate money supply for their own benefit, but they can't do anything to stop people from choosing a better currency. Cronies get demonetized and finally they lose power. Same thing is happening in Africa in many countries.
We know that in a free market, people tend to choose money that has certain properties. Historically, gold has been the best form of money, and it has been chosen by a free market, not by legislation. The most important property of Bitcoin is that it can't be debased arbitrarily, which is similar to gold. Bitcoin can be also easily stored and transferred, which makes it better than gold.
So, as long as people keep choosing to use Bitcoin rather than something else, it will also gain or hold its value. It is not immune to losing value, but there has to be even better currency, or it has to be banned. Both of these options might be impossible.
I don't think banning it is that implausible. The energy costs of transferring it are not trivial, making small transfers impractical. That cost also makes it politically interesting to suppress it.
The metric of energy per transaction doesn't actually make sense, because there can be almost unlimited number of layer 2 transactions, whether they're on Lightning Network[0] or something else. Most Bitcoin transactions happen already on Lightning Network. Also, the energy used in mining is mostly independent from the number of on-chain transactions.
The energy is not used to append new transactions, but to keep the complete transaction history objectively immutable, i.e. the network is designed to defend digital property rights with energy.
I've been out of the btc loop since around 2016 but I remember a lot of people were very negative about lightning network back then. The main contentions were that it was not actually trustless and it would create a semi-centralized hierarchy of third parties rather than being p2p, leading to big bank-like actors that could veto your transactions.
Has this changed significantly? Just asking because you seem knowledgable
I think most of that talk was just speculation coming from the Bitcoin Cash camp. It's open and permissionless network so it's always possible to route around bad actors, for example if someone tries to censor transactions. Transactions are onion routed anonymously so individual nodes don't see where the transactions originally come from and where they are going.
LN is trustless when you run your own node. When using a third-party node you have to trust the wallet/node provider to some extent.
Thanks. Yeah a lot of what the BCH people were saying at the time made sense to me, the fact that BCH flopped notwithstanding. I'm always suspicious of attempts to transact crypto in a way that isn't "on-chain" because it just intuitively seems like a way for our existing financial/legal power structures to undermine the ultimate authority of the blockchain. I'll have to do some reading on how LN actually works in current year, onion routing sounds like a great idea assuming that, unlike tor, it would be cost-prohibitive for one actor to just run 80% of the nodes and deanonymize you.
Mining bitcoins costs lots of economic value (energy, hardware, personnel) and produces virtually none. It's extremely uneconomical in the purest sense of the term.