This life is needlessly absurd.
Why does this even exist?
And yes, I get what mining is and I get what the blockchain does. I’m saying that proof of work is absurd.
Worse of all, many different coins have proved you can have different proofing methods and those could be applied to Bitcoin but core developers will pull any shenanigan to avoid this.
The authoritarian state of KYC/AML might be even more absurd to some.
Welcome to our cashless society. It’s naive to think no one would fight back.
It may have devolved to useless speculation and gambling for now, but the genie cannot be put back into the bottle very easily at this point.
Those datacenters are the moai of our time; if you step back, it's interesting to watch.
We stare at screens full of text and pictures every day. We had screens full of text and pictures 20 years ago. Yet somehow we have justified re-creating every single component multiple times over, spending hundreds of trillions of dollars, to get the same thing we had 20 years ago.
We've been able to talk to machines, have them understand that speech, and do work based on it, for decades. But we're all still typing into keyboards.
We've had devices which can track our eyes to move a mouse pointer for 37 years, but we all still use our hands/thumbs to move a mouse.
We had mobile devices which had dedicated keys for input which allowed us to input without looking, and we replaced those with mobile devices with no dedicated keys (so we have to look to provide input) and bodies made of glass so they would shatter when dropped and required additional plastic coverings to protect them. Even automobiles, where safety is a high priority, also adopted input devices which require looking away from the road.
Our world includes a government which is indented to be led via decisions from all the people, and could easily be overthrown by all the people, but only a select few people actually get to make decisions, and they don't have to listen to the people, and basically do whatever they want (wrt the other few people who get to make decisions).
Yes, life is needlessly absurd. It's best not to think about it unless you wanna end up in a padded room.