Is the wheel of the cryptocurrency miner, or the wheel of the landlord or business owner really that different?
Minimum wage jobs are exactly the class of jobs where we can be certain that value was created. Much of the higher-level jobs is just making sure that that value doesn't spoil, that it doesn't go lost, that it can make its way around the economy to enable further value creation (at the hand of another minimum wage job) as soon as possible. Some higher-level jobs like engineer can amplify the value creation by designing new tools for the job, but the value itself still stems from the actions of those manual labourers.
> Some higher-level jobs like engineer can amplify the value creation by designing new tools for the job, but the value itself still stems from the actions of those manual labourers.
This is a nice variation of the Chinese Room argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
Who is creating the value, the one that is writing the instruction or the one that is following blindly the instructions? [In real life it's more complicated because the designers have feedback from the operators and also because usually the instructions are underspecified.]