As stated a couple of times now, it's not useless work, it's work that keeps the system running.
It's work needed to be done by someone.
When no actual economic activity took place, no it did not need doing. It's like holding a webcam show in your living room with 0 viewers, holding on to half your paycheck, and then expecting to be paid at the same minute value as when the webcam show has a million viewers. The models who are asked to potentially join the service and actually bring in the views might balk at that prospect and choose a different provider.
That's not a currency. That is more like a share of a start-up business. Why anybody started buying into the business at all, injecting real money in it, is some weird quirk of human nature.
No work == No transactions == No payment system == No nothing.
Yet somebody is willing to give money for nothing. (And 2D chicks for free.)
So, let me rephrase that:
You don't know what Bitcoin is, how it works, or what it's good for, but came up with an idea that is somehow better?
It's the newbie forum, and it's a pretty obvious flaw with the whole idea of holding Bitcoin or running a node - or at least seen as such by a large number of people. Most of them don't even register here - they just reject it and move on.
I see Bitcoin as a proof of concept and as an alternative payment processing system, like Ripple or Hawala, but the overblown focus of mining is something that should be solved - or at least it should be better explained in a way that's easily understandable. I'm quite well educated, and understand how asymmetric encryption work, but I still haven't "seen the light" after quite a bit of reading, and I am skeptical of any belief system that requires "convincing yourself" of anything.
Sure, forks are well and good, but I wanted to understand the original. Plus ASICs are cool as a concept in themselves.
At the moment, bitcoin are futures in electricity wasting, ridicule and job loss (as brought up in this thread). Sure, they're being used for some transactions too, but it seems in the mentality of some that the actual economic activity is a sideshow to the mining.
I can think of one surefire way to make something worthless though, give it to everyone for free.
I hope you don't work in marketing, because limited freebies are a great marketing tool. Note I said limited. You might be gifted your first Birthcoin at birth, or age of maturity, but that's the only one you'll be given by the system - you have to work for, or convince others to give you, any more than that.