securing world's financial system is not a waste of energy; introducing any valuable side effects of mining would destabilize mining incentive system; energy is going green anyways.
Exactly. And mining using green energy is going to be the most profitable way to mine as the cost of solar drops. If we have a highly competitive / high tech mining industry, they’re going to be nimble to adapt to this change. Much faster than trying to convert the current banking industry over to green energy.Plus people act like it’s trivial or easy to change the mining algorithm for bitcoin. It’s never going to happen. It would lead to a contentious hard fork and market confusion because no way everyone would agree.
Solar is neither green energy. Each stage in solar plate manufacturing is powered by energy from fossil fuels, from mining of rare earth metal with cranes that require 200lt of diesel/hr (single crane) and manufacturing in factory all the way to transportation. This also produces tons of harmful toxic waste everyday.
The only energy that is realistically clean, green and economical is nuclear energy. Especially thorium energy, this thing will power our future but greedy oil corporation have halted the research on it in the west even though US created one in the 60s but it was shut down due to cold war as unlike Uranium power plants, thorium power plants can't be used to create nuclear weapons. Due to this China and India are at least 15 years ahead in Thorium research. Just look it up - thorium.