> Producing fraudulent blocks (ie, containing double-spends) is the same as "discarding all the hashes"
no, it's not the same, it has the purpose of Producing fraudulent blocks. you're contradicting yourself within single sentence..
> The wastefulness of PoW guarantees
there is no wastefulness. there is energy consumption with purpose of securing the blockchain.
it would have been wasteful if difficulty was fixed and miner was spending 100 times more energy than necessary to create a block every 10 minutes, but since difficulty adjusts - there is zero waste in PoW. every joule spent was necessary and provided value.
no, it's not the same, it has the purpose of Producing fraudulent blocks. you're contradicting yourself within single sentence..
> The wastefulness of PoW guarantees
there is no wastefulness. there is energy consumption with purpose of securing the blockchain.
it would have been wasteful if difficulty was fixed and miner was spending 100 times more energy than necessary to create a block every 10 minutes, but since difficulty adjusts - there is zero waste in PoW. every joule spent was necessary and provided value.