&gt; I will admit I am not up on block chain tech or the process it uses, but it does seem like a lot of wasted resources to just compute hashes.<p>To be fair, the blockchain is the largest distributed rainbow table in history, so it does have some value in that sense.<p>But arguing that &quot;it is a waste&quot; to use hashing is to not understand the security properties offered by bitcoin and why it&#x27;s actually vital to use hashes.