To be honest, this is my reason for not jumping mindlessly on the cryptocurrency bandwagon: it's wasting so much resources and power, especially when you take a look at videos of mining farms.
An American computer engineer is sent to install the machine. He chuckles at the monks' superstition: they claim that generating the billion gibberish strings is a task from God and the fundamental purpose of the universe.
On the other side the crypto mining is not only the power consumption: it's all the hardware and it's production as well. The ASIC antminers can't be used for anything else, hard to recycle as well and they constantly need to get bigger and faster. For Ethereum, people are buying shitloads of high end GPUs.
I also don't like the idea of storing insane amount of data, hoping to find correlations to make more money, but this is also nothing I can do anything about.