[majinuub]

I'll repeat what I said in another comment here:

What's valuable is purely subjective. That's what makes markets work. Its also why planning economies from the top down doesn't work. What seems like wasted energy or capital to you is very useful to another person. Many people (myself included) believe that a decentralized, digital, hard money that is tied to the real world through energy is extremely important. So to those people its not a waste of energy, far from it.

[woodruffw]

"What's valuable is purely subjective" is the kind of basal argument that nobody finds convincing. It's also a far cry from a justification for wasting energy, unless you plan to take an excursion into the lands of moral relativism.

Here is my opinion: it is entirely possible, common even, for people to be just plain wrong about the things that they value. That doesn't mean they don't value them; it means that their underlying justification is predicated on transient conditions (like artificial scarcity) or is otherwise underdeveloped w/r/t to their motivations. Bitcoin epitomizes this.