Well, What I meant is that even if mining is the only solution, why is it all that big? Is there really no easier way than that programmatically?
If you want something that isn't as complex, you can implement a database systems which doesn't require much computational power at all, ie. Visa. That hardly helps with decentralization or security at all. Mining in the context of PoW offers a way for the network to achieve consensus and at the same time having huge amount of costs being incurred. In Bitcoin and other similar cryptos, mining is a necessity in the system. I find the issue pretty much discussed to death. There are obviously various solutions that probably require less resource consumption... Is Bitcoin going to switch to that? Probably not. That is the end of discussion.
