Meanwhile the systems developed by crypto researchers more than twenty years ago solve the same problem, have well-defined security notions and guarantees, use substantially less power, scale better, permit secure offline transactions, and do not require a complete rethinking of modern economic theory to make sense. Of course, those systems all failed due to poor management, lack of demand, and so forth; Bitcoin has seen better management and appeals to a particular political position, and has thus succeeded (at the cost of an increasing amount of coal burned for its sake).
The difference is that those systems did not solve the "double-spend" problem. Every single prior ecash system required some sort of centralized trusted entity (or a pool of them) in order to ensure double-spends didn't occur.
Bitcoin is the first ecash system that is truly decentralized. This is what makes it technically superior to prior systems, and this is why it is succeeding.
Sometimes people forget that mining has an important property: it is relatively fair compared to other mode of distribution of coin. I would prefer a fair system rather than a system controlled by single entity that distribute the coin as it sees fit.
The mining profit is approximately the percentage of miner's computing power divided by total network computing power.
If that were the case with BTC, nobody would be mining it.
Is there value in maintaining safe money stores and transaction integrity? Yes. Is that value the same as the value of all outstanding currency in the world? For anything but BTC, the answer is 'Hell, no!'.
Err, your logic is flawed. It is the opposite. If it were the case with BTC, then many people would be mining, which is actually what is happening!
In other words: you claim that the resource & labour cost in making and mining 1 Bitcoin with an ASIC mining are huge. This is wrong. The difference in orders of magnitude is so big that this is precisely why the mining activity is currently exploding: there are huge profits to be made due to this difference between cost and value.
