technically almost everything beyond food and medicine is wasteful.
BUT cars improve the quality of my life (i like to drive). bitcoins floating through the cybersphere do not. end of story.
> cars improve the quality of my life (i like to drive)
And if cars were primarily used as an enthusiast pursuit (like horses in the modern world, actually), this argument would make sense. But cars are not primarily an enthusiast pursuit, instead they are something that we've structured our entire way of life around, and made enormous sacrifices for. Many people need a car whether they want one or not, and we all pay the consequences for it.
Wasteful things like space programs still result in training and gaining experience. That experience can then be used on more productive activities once they have been discovered.
Human existence is meaningless and thus anything we do is meaningless. However, that also frees us up to do whatever we want since there is no universal authority telling us how to live our lives. Even in the face of an abusive police state we can still decide to resist.
The problem with Bitcoin is that if one were to maximize human potential then Bitcoin would be a really, really low bar. It's basically a premium currency for an MMO, except the MMO doesn't exist and there is no item shop and even the idea of creating such an item shop (think of NFTs) suffers from problems mentioned in the article. You can simply copy digital assets. Ownership over a digital asset doesn't protect it from being copied.
