It sounds terrible when you approach it from the point of money. Of course you can do money more efficiently. But if you approach this form the side of energy it's a way to organically tie a value to any energy produced. Even the energy produced at times when production vastly exceeds the demand. And that's going to be most of the energy produced since we need to develop renewables capacity and can't really wait for the storage technologies that lag horribly so we can match the supply the demand.
This is a way to make all energy valuable and providing incentive to build renewables even when 90% of the energy they produce will find no traditional buyer.
It's not really wasteful if you use excess energy for mining that you couldn't store because storage is very limited.
The goal is not efficiency. The goal to provide incentive to overbuild the renewables.
Or even good old centralised distributed systems that do it another 4 to 6 orders of magnitude more efficiently than PoS.
It sounds terrible when you approach it from the point of money. Of course you can do money more efficiently. But if you approach this form the side of energy it's a way to organically tie a value to any energy produced. Even the energy produced at times when production vastly exceeds the demand. And that's going to be most of the energy produced since we need to develop renewables capacity and can't really wait for the storage technologies that lag horribly so we can match the supply the demand.
This is a way to make all energy valuable and providing incentive to build renewables even when 90% of the energy they produce will find no traditional buyer.
Using crypto to consume stranded wind and solar is an elegant idea.