So...nobody has any clue then? lolz.

Ok, let me try again. I mean look, it takes a lot of money to grow pot, in fact. Theoretically, yes, you get a seed free in your bag, you stick it in the ground and up it grows. But in reality, all the pot farms supplying dispensaries with high quality herb spend a lot of money on electricity, fertilizer, and clones (it's very uneconomical to grow from seeds).

But if this is in doubt, let's use gold. That costs a ton of money to produce or invest in.

The coin miner spends only a few dollars in electricity.

This doesn't matter, because the guy trading gold for the coin can't get that electricity. The coin has no real value. The guy with the gold GAVE it value, by agreeing to hand over X amount of gold for a coin.

My question is, WHY would anyone do this? What is the perceived advantage? What are they trying to accomplish, that could possibly make it worth giving away a bunch of their hard earned gold in return for an easily earned string of code, whose value is, after all, defined only by how much of my gold I decided to hand out for it in the first place?