No, people mine because a global contest was the only way to create a self synchronized global database. Why a global database? To avoid the problem of double spending that all other electronic money initiatives had. But this is a distributed instead of a centralized database.

The process of mining is a way to make all miners maintain the blockchain in working order. Every miner has a copy of the full blockchain DB and all these copies are in sync. In fact, a mined block is a list of transactions between accounts, with their corresponding digital signatures.

The incentive of giving a token size of bitcoins to the first miner that finds the correct hash signature was to make mining something that people would like to do, instead of a burden for everyone.

If you can find another way to make a group of very diverse people, with possibly diverse interests in the game, to maintain a distributed networked database in sync, welcome to the community.

In fact, some groups are starting to test one alternative to mining, called Proof of Stake. If it is better for everyone, then another currency instead of Bitcoin will take the crown.

1) With electric heat you have to account for the energy production and grid transmission being around 30% efficient. Even though an electric heater or bitcoin miner is converting electricity to heat 100% efficiently, a majority of the thermal energy released in the power plant was already thrown out as waste.

2) Even using electricity, a heat pump beats the electric heaters. They're 2-3x as "efficient" in terms of how much heat it pushes into the house vs how much electricity it takes to do it. Technically this is measured as "coefficient of performance" instead of efficiency, since it's a ratio of heat transferred / energy consumed, rather than energy released / energy consumed (and efficiency >100% wouldn't make much sense).

3) Gas furnaces can be >90% efficient, which also beats the bitcoin miners. Even the lowest efficiency allowed by law (78%) is better than resistive electric.

4) There's more "embodied energy" in building a bitcoin miner than an electric heater, and it has a very short life as a useful miner before it's obseleted by newer chips.

Resistive electric heating only makes sense if you're looking for a low cost solution in a climate with a very minor cold season. And I highly doubt anybody's going to buy a bitcoin miner with the intent to only run it 3 weeks a year when it gets chilly outside.

Bitcoin is basically a giant scheme to extract as much value for the miners by dumping a bunch of externalities on everyone else in the form of fossil fuel subsidies and greenhouse gas production. Not a fan.

EDIT: Unless you live somewhere where the ambient temp goes below ~0F, get a heat pump.

The latter part is true, but BTC cannot provide that. It's nothing more than a nifty hack. It kind of works, which is impressive, but it is horrible inefficient and impossible to scale due to its inherent limitations. So far the only solutions that have been proposed were to tack on even more complexity. To make matters worse, all of these solutions have remained vapourware for quite some time.

> Numerous monetary crises could be addressed in serious ways by it, though.

How? It would have not prevented the Dotcom Bubble. It would have not prevented the Subprime Mortgage Crisis. It would have not kept Argentina or Greece from borrowing way too much money. It's a libertarian pipe dream that Bitcoin will magically solve all of the world's economic problems. In fact, it would make matters worse due to unpredictable volatility and its lack of scalability. It would only drag any country trying to adopt it into a deflationary death spiral. There is a reason why the gold standard has been abolished.

To give an example of this, Bitcoin appears to be growing in popularity in Greece:

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/rollout-1000-bitcoin-atms-planned-g...

http://www.coindesk.com/has-the-greek-crisis-increased-bitco...

That may be true, however, every time we've replaced one currency with another there have been unforeseen consequences decades or centuries later.

One dead-simple example: A bitcoin can be divided down to 8 decimal places and there is a limited supply. It is deflationary. No, that isn't a good thing (ignoring short-term greed). What happens when we either mine all the bitcoins, or mining more becomes computationally impossible? How do you run a business when the minimum possible amount of currency increases by $1 every day? You have a piece of bread worth $3, but the minimum amount someone can give you is $5 (then $6, then $7). Suddenly this deflationary currency that was supposed to fix everything has resulted in global hyperinflation.

"So we'll just switch to a new system at that point." We can't get countries to drive on the same side of the road, use the same measurement system or even upgrade to IPv6. How on earth are you going to roll out a global currency change overnight? Bitcoin stakeholders can't even agree on much smaller changes at the moment.

Call it a commodity, sure. It is not a viable long-term currency.

The price is based on utility of the commodity and speculation about its future utility, not mining costs. Put another way: more hash power does not raise the value but more value may raise the hash power (by making it profitable for less efficient miners to mine).

> how a structure on top could be created to leverage bitcoin without mining.

There's lots of activity around alternatives to bitcon's proof-of-work based mining: proof of stake, proof of activity, etc. Just search "proof of work alternatives"

Bitcoin is not necessary. The environment is. Easier solution is stop operating a power plant to play speculator on play money.

As for the transactions vs hashes correlation, while technically true, in practice the two are inevitably linked, as the currency must be protected proportionally to the sums it manages. As more value is stored and transacted, so the incentive to attack it increases, and so an increase in the cost of attacking it is required. Though it might trail off at some point, Bitcoin's history has shown this relation to exist.

In practice ACH transfers within the United States are free and clear within a few days(giving you time to catch fraud). There's also very little technical barrier to transferring money abroad, although there is risk to the bank.

Credit cards are a different matter. They have to clear instantly so the merchant is guaranteed payment(excepting a chargeback). Bitcoin (usually) clears in an hour, or at least 10 minutes, so it's unsuitable for realtime financial transactions unless you build a financial industry on top of it to mitigate risk.

And, other digital currency implementation don't require 'mining' at all; just the paranoid ones.

Plus they still manage to destroy economies with hyperinflation. They're more wasteful in providing a worse product.