You speak of working extremely hard to optimize a piece of hardware. Yes, someone would have to do that, until it "performed correctly".
But once you have that, hardware is reproducable. You could build a million of them, in a factory in India. Maybe we haven't created the perfect box yet, so maybe we really are still in that wonderful creative stage, but it will happen, sooner rather than later. In some ways it sounds like a cool hobby.
Now, what i don't know is the details of what these computers are actually calculating to "earn" a "bitcoin" (or is it giving birth to bitcoins? I guess you could look at it a lot of ways). Is this calculation going to save our planet?
Although the way you said it maybe you are saying that just the creation of bitcoins with this computer is what will change the world. Like if bitcoins would save the world, we could make billions of them in an instant, they are just electronic creations.
But in fact, if we simply grant everything you said, what you are describing is not "currency". My argument is that bitcoin is not "money". Your argument is that it is:
The Bitcoin protocol is the most important breakthrough in the history of computer science. It is not a coin, it is a decentralized autonomous network that before its discovery was impossible to imagine.That sounds really cool, but it does not sound like "money".
I wouldn't pretend to think you'd be impressed by what I know, or shocked at what I don't know; I work very hard to not indicate what I actually do know.
“Bitcoins don’t require work. They require that you have money to buy expensive processors. Then you let computer programs run. That is not work, although the next generation probably thinks that this is work, which makes me fear for our country, because they don’t understand what actual work means.
These are people getting out of college who think you earn money chopping down trees on minecraft, if you know what i mean.”
That is what you said.
I stated that “ You have no knowledge of what you speak of”. I have no ( factory in India to build a million of them ) at my home. I wish I was being funny, I stand by my statement, you don’t have a clue .