A trillion dollars disappeared in a day because someone made a garbage generator that uses fewer irreplaceable natural resources than the current garbage generators, and that makes me think about cobblestones.

Remember cobblestones? You could hook your computer up to a big distributed science project, there were tons to choose from, you could fold human proteomes, you could search for extraterrestrial intelligence, you could map cancer markers, develop better solar cell materials, all sorts of stuff. It took the form of a screensaver - whenever you weren't using your computer your CPU fans would spin up and you'd be folding. Move your mouse and it pauses. Great stuff. Something useful for your computer to do when you step away for a minute.

Anyway, you'd get credit for the work your computer had done. Cobblestones, they were called. They were never used as currency, they were just to show off. A cobblestone was a kind of receipt to show that your computer had done something useful.

We never used cobblestones as currency, but we could've. Instead we got bitcoin, which is a receipt that shows that your computer made a bitcoin. What's the bitcoin for? Being a receipt that your computer made a bitcoin.

It served as proof that you'd wasted some electricity.

Proof of waste.

There's other cryptocurrencies as well, some of which work differently to the proof of waste system, and those are worthless, because they're not proof of waste.

The waste is the point.

Now we get this market crash today, money disappeared, because the new AI thing is roughly as pointless as the old one but nowhere near as wasteful.

The waste, is the point. We saw it with cryptocurrencies and we saw it with NFTs and we see it with AI.

The waste has to be the point, because to some people, waste equals scarcity equals wealth equals power. The waste has to be the point because the machines that process the pointlessness have to be expensive, have to be owned by someone, have to be inaccessible to the average person, have to be manufactured and sold and rented out, the means of production of the pointlessness has to be in the right hands. The waste has to be the point, because otherwise we would've decided years ago that a cobblestone was worth a twentieth of a nice sandwich.

The waste is the point.