&gt; HTTPS is the means to an end, bitcoin is just wasting resources.<p>Bitcoins is also a means to an end, you just don&#x27;t seem to understand what the end is.<p>&gt; If the point was just to maintain the blockchain integrity there would be no need to make its difficulty ever increasing.<p>This is incorrect. The blockchain requires miners to establish an unbiased ledger history. The difficulty parameter is tweaked so that the whole system can be future proofed against an adversary creating a convincing blockchain history (which was biased to double-spending or retracting a transaction).