> We literally set things on fire to generate electricity for these global brute force algorithms.

Who's "we"? Because I don't. People who mine do. They do it by their own free will. It's their resources they spend.

If you want to talk about setting things on fire for no reason, let's talk about smoking. Google tells me more than a billion people smoke. I'll argue that the maintenance of a decentralized, publicly accounted money system is more useful than people inhaling tobacco smoke.