Maybe so, but at least mining is actually necessary to get gold out of the ground. Whereas running a distributed database and gambling can both be had for much less.
All of bitcoin could be run on a home PC from 2005. It can do about three transactions a second. And it is burning 0.5% of the electricity of the entire planet to do so.
This is basically a crime against humanity at this point.
Bitcoin is not the only cryptocurrency
Genocide is not the only crime against humanity, yet it is still illegal. Go figure.
You talked past each other here.
Yes, but gold hasn't been explicitly designed to require ever increasing amounts of energy to extract ever diminishing quantities, and gold does have some practical use (approx 8% of annual production is used in mobile phones, televisions etc.)
I can find both mining gold to store in basements and mining bitcoins incredibly stupid, selfish and irresponsible. They are not mutually exclusive.
Mining gold still is. At least gold has uses that make it better than copper in some electrical uses.