And it's scarcity is a product of its demand. Therefore, owing to the law of supply and demand which derives solely from human desires of turning "what is" into "what I want," any gold pulled out of the ground is a product of human desire, and, by definition is NOT WASTE.  If the price and quantity demanded by the market are below the extraction cost for the miner then that demand will remain unmet.  Again, this is the opposite of waste.

Ta,

I definitely consider it the lesser of two evils. Either they steal electricity while brute forcing corporate passwords in order to extort payments to cover up the security breaches or they steal electricity while providing a valuable service to the bitcoin community. It of course would be better for the botnets to not exist than to have them generating bitcoins, but that is neither here nor there.

As for bitcoin encouraging people to start botnets, I don't think that will happen. Although botnet operators can benefit from generating bitcoins, they're still subject to the limited size of the bitcoin economy and competition from other botnet operators and from the bitcoin community. There is a fairly limited number of total dollars being offered at any time for bitcoins at the current exchange rate. This puts a bottleneck restriction on the speed at which they can profit from their bitcoins. This limited supply of dollars coupled with the extremely low operating costs for the botnet operators themselves is a ripe condition for competing botnet operators to have to constantly undercut one another in order to get their hands on the dollars available. There is also a bottleneck for creating bitcoins since botnet competition, including competition from a growing bitcoin user base with the collective power of a botnet, cuts directly into their ability to generate bitcoins.

All this demonstrates that botnet participation in the bitcoin network reduces criminal activity without significantly increasing the amount of electricity that is stolen and that bitcoin provides considerably less incentive for people to become botnet operators than the preexisting vulnerability of big businesses and home computers.

Edit: In response to your last question, not only do all people unequivocally have the moral right to make moral judgments based on their perspective of social harm and benefits but we also have an important moral obligation to do so.

Sure, in exactly the same way the existence of credit cards motivates behavior of stealing credit card numbers from innocent credit card users.

Or the existence of bank accounts motivates hackers to try to break into your system to find out your bank account number.

Or the existence of cars motivates some people to steal gasoline from innocent service station owners.

I believe the benefits of Bitcoin will outweigh the harm, and I further believe that I am capable of making that moral judgment.  I might be wrong, and I might regret I ever got involved, but if I only ever did things that I was 100% certain were going to work out for the best I would never accomplish anything new and interesting.

Wait, so you don't care if the botnet steals cycles from a computer that was won in a sweepstakes because that isn't real?

The rules of law is a crucial factor in the creation of a wealthy society. Anything that does not fit shall be terminated with extreme prejudices. If that mean taking out the power of the government so be it. If that mean no tolerance for the idea of democracy, so be it. If "diversity" itself should be terminated, so be it.

The Asic Miner chips could transfer 100% electricity to heat, and we could reuse nearly 90% heat to provide heating services through liquid cooling system.

Next month on Aug. 9th, we gonna host 2nd bitcoin heat day in memory of Satoshi's prediction, we will show how we could heat the greenhouse through the bitcoin mining process.

In your difficult case, Bitcoin uses a lot of energy, which hinders its growth. In fact, minting's high energy use may be harmful. Initially, your statement about squandering energy looks true, however your thinking is wrong.

First off, Bitcoin mining requires electricity and computer tools that are not always comparable to its value. Disconnect: worth is personal and depends on numerous variables. Also, your "compucoin" example is a good one, but its not a Bitcoin comparison.

Since usability, security, and popularity determine competitiveness in the real world, the claim that Bitcoin is less competitive because it uses a lot of energy is absurd. The energy issue is significant, but it won't determine Bitcoin's success.