No, I actually agree with the person. Cryptocurrency is horrendously wasteful. But that person ignored what I said because that's not what I was discussing. That's the straw man argument I mentioned.
Yes, the end result is a secured ledger. The path to that secured ledger is entirely wasted computing. Bitcoin is wasteful solely based on this fact. How can you consider Bitcoin wasteful as I do and also claim people who point this flaw out are naysayers who don’t get it? Your argument makes no sense.
It's not doing nothing. It's searching - searching for a hash that can be used to protect the ledger from attacks.
Saying it's doing nothing is like saying Dijkstra's algorithm is doing nothing until it finally finds the shortest path. That's just plain wrong. Sorry.