But it's unbounded wasteful, why does nobody get that. There is no correlation with proof of work energy spent and actual value of transactions. Even worse, proof of work is almost exponentially getting worse over time.
> Even worse, proof of work is almost exponentially getting worse over time.
Huh? Exponentially? The difficulty level is rising exponentially, but that's owing to continued investment in specialized hashing hardware. I certainly don't think that the actual amount of electricity being put into hashing is still growing exponentially. It would only grow exponentially if the price of Bitcoin continued to appreciate exponentially, and that hasn't been the case in years.
The network burns precisely as much energy as is needed to throttle the rate of consumption (roughly 25 btc per 10 minutes). It is bounded by the intrinsic and speculative value of Bitcoin.
Gasoline at least gets you from A to B.
Burning cycles is much more wasteful. Bitcoin's proof of work/waste is really something like 'I can prove that it is statistically likely that I wasted a shit-ton of power heating this data centre, doing SHA hashes, trying to find one that has a high number of leading zeros.' That's pretty wasteful IMO.
Burning cycles is the glue that binds a new block to the chain. The strength of this glue is what enables bitcoin's censorship degree of resistance. You may find censorship wasteful (and I don't particularly need that either), but the entirety of the bitcoin economy disagrees. Similarly I think people who have a two hour drive to work is wasteful.
