But they are just that, edge cases. And they will stay that way.
If a case like this were to become the main use of cryptocurrency, it would be a travesty, as it would be better to not burn the excess energy for hash-searching but to innovate better distributed storage-retrieval at that scale.
Of course it's good to bring electricity to those who lack it and want it.
But if that program ever gets so big that using any excess to mine crypto is a major use-case for crypto, then such programs have achieved a scale that rather than mining crypto with the excess everyone would be much better off, and sufficient scale would have been achieved that it would be more feasible & beneficial to develop better methods of excess-energy-storage
I.e., better at scale to [increase total energy availability] than to [mine crypto].
Bitcoin mining is a waste of energy, by design. It is proof-of-work; it is built from the ground up to repeatedly spend electricity on redundant calculations.
If you don't need to perform work of equivalent value to the money you are creating, what do you think will happen?
(here's a clue: https://ibb.co/pWZfMQc)
If the amount of work put into getting it is not reciprocal to the value of the outcome, then yes I would consider it a waste. So would most commercial gold miners, I reckon.
> If you don't need to perform work of equivalent value to the money you are creating, what do you think will happen?
The work miners do doesn't give Bitcoin it's value, the supply and demand economy does. Miners are supposed to validate blocks and push the ledger forward, without an active trading economy their work is inherently wasted. That's like... Bitcoin 101 right there. God help you if you own any.