It makes sense because they know very well that numbers on the screen is all they have. But as long as there are enough suckers that want to buy them because they believe that numbers count some magic coins, they'll keep spending energy to get them.
yes that's the key. as long as there are people that will buy them off of them. they'll burn tires or put up solar panels or any number of crazy things just so they can turn a profit at the very end. i really don't think they care about "securing the network" in other words.
It all boils down to ignorance and greed. People are generally ignorant of what money is. And they saw others "profiting off of Bitcoin" so they just want to get in, no matter what. That's why you can sell the digit "1" for $70K or two digits for $1M. It's literal madness.
if bitcoin was the only game in town, maybe i would be more inclined to think of it as "money" but there's litterly tons of cryptocurrencies. they can't all survive. and i'm not sure bitcoin has any advantages over some of them. so why would i want to put all my money in something that might end up going to zero? kind of a rhetorical question for people who are "all in" with bitcoin. but i know they don't worry about that since they think its just always going to go "up". they're not looking at the overall market so i can forgive them...