I'm a miner. I hash numerous currencies for money. Are the profits great? Considering returns, right now, yeah. If you're smart about card price and don't buy much above MSRP, know what you're doing, and get good hardware that holds reasonable salvage after expensing everything, it's a good gig minus the fan noise, coil whine, constant emails telling me someone is offline....
It wasn't profits that drove me to mine. I happen to have a degree in biochemistry and wanted to stomp all over Boinc charts. I want to host my DNA and run sequence matching to see if there are dark corners of my genome that will cause me problems. I don't want Ancestry to keep copies of my markers for the world to see. I have no interest in random people emailing me to regale me with with their amazement at being my third cousin thrice removed. I want cameras to watch my gait and tell me when to see the chiropractor without my insurance knowing I masturbated in an awkward position last night. I want to take selfies and see if my kidneys need a freshen up without posting them to Microsofts Health Vault. And, in the event of an emergency, I want to be able to send all this 'me' to a doctor at a moments notice without paying Amazon to sell me vitamins. But, guess what. Having a science degree doesn't mean you can afford shit. I can't buy three to ten thousand dollar graphics cards to plug away at in my free time. I can't even buy a decent gaming card should I want to shoot some zombies. No way can I afford wireless cameras and redundant storage box (FreeNAS FTW), unless it's an investment. Why can't my investment in myself pay me now?
I can say with a high degree of certainty that our compute requirements are growing exponentially. As populations grow more dense, as bacteria become more resistant to our efforts, as we stamp out native ecologies and bastardize our food, making good decisions gets harder. Way harder. So hard, that there are less than a thousand computing centers owned by less than 500 companies or governments, that are capable of tackling the data streams and analytics necessary to make best decisions. We aren't making best decisions now. Our leaders know they aren't making good decisions. They are often proud of their ignorance. Distributed computing and immutable storage of results will prevent say Donald Trump from removing climate data from the EPA's website or the FDA masking clinical trial data.
I'm also against appreciating home values. I believe this generates housing inequality and reduces access to affordable homes in areas with the best employment opportunities. There's a reason I haven't moved to Seattle or Portland. Got my degree ten years too late. And I can't sublet my house to support the move while I'm in it. I can't save enough fast enough to make the move worthwhile just yet. What can I do with my day to day, with my space (more than I need) to generate passive income. I can mine.
Mining gives me the money to buy better hardware. Hardware I couldn't ever afford otherwise. Mining gives me the CUDA and Tensor cores to play with at my leisure instead of renting some companies rig by the hour. In the future, I believe we'll be able to convert the waste energy to pre-heat my water, maybe recycle some back into electricity to improve efficiency. It also lets me generate passive income by keeping my house clean, my electric up to code, my homeowners insurance high. I pay gross receipts on my sales.
I guess, what I'm trying to say is, proof of stake gets us nothing we don't already have and haven't already given up by way of laziness. Low level investors will delegate their authority for small passive income. Delegates will be corrupted. And we're back to square one. Please, please. Whoever is listening. Mathematicians, physicists, others in bioinformatics. Get useful proof of work up and running.