Before people jump down your throat with pseudo ethical pearl clutching, just replace "do something useful" with "generate income".
You don't have to personally believe that bitcoin mining is "useful" to acknowledge that it certainly can generate real money to offset the cost of a remote experiment like this one.
I have to admit I'm amazed how sentiment on HN against cryptocurrency has turned sharply negative.
I think a year ago we were comfortable with Bitcoin as a store of value but the NFT craze has made almost all of us adopt the "right-clicker mentality".
Years ago I was an INTP but something happened to me a year ago and I got into doing art projects and I lately scored as an INFP. I told my therapist the other day that, more than anything else, I want to plant my feelings like seeds, intensify and cultivate them, compress them into a ball, throw it at somebody and have it hit them like a lighting bolt.
NFT people drive me nuts because (1) I'm not that good at art, (2) I want to get much better, (3) I know I'm going to do that by really emotionally connecting with people and (4) I can't know I'm really doing it with people who are blinded with NFT greed. (Look at the sh1t they buy!)
I think it's more that people are getting increasingly terrified by the threat of climate change, so anything that uses and "unnecessary" energy is the most evil thing in the world. Naturally, these same people rarely turn their energy use critiques on their own hyper wasteful western lifestyles.
Ironically, bitcoin is one of the few things that gives me hope for a future potentially devastated by threats like climate change.
honestly part of staying sane as a working artist is quickly learning to detach notions of quality and value from one another. robert hughes outlined the depressing absurdity of art speculation over a decade before anyone ever uttered the phrase nft.
You don't have to personally believe that bitcoin mining is "useful" to acknowledge that it certainly can generate real money to offset the cost of a remote experiment like this one.