Call me naive, but am I the only one who looks at mining as one of the worst inventions for consuming energy possible?
Almost all of society functions on energy, some of the largest breakthroughs in society have been on sudden abundance of cheap energy and the machines, vehicles products they can create.
Entire economies can be crippled by rising costs in energy (oil shocks of the 70s) and boom by sudden drops in cost of energy.
So we've created an "industry" where you are essentially paid by comverting energy to waste. Paid to perform extremely intense difficult (ie wasteful) operations to back a useful technology (digital currency).
Assuming it catches on, energy will never be cheap, there will always be a higher floor now due to options for "mining". As we get better at it and it becomes less wasteful, the digital system will simply raise the reward so people are incentivised to once again waste it.
Ignore the short term for the moment, and which ever currency you're backing. We've created a long term societal motivation/reward to harvest every joule produce by the sun and use it to calculate hashes. I'm not talking about the next decade obviously, but we have incentivised that behavior.
If there is anything technologists should understand is that whatever your beautiful perfect technology is, it will instead be used based on whatever has been incentivised.
Regardless of the technology it powers, this is a terrible societal incentive - and one that will be around a lot longer than people are considering.