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@fluffgar @limebar Mining is an incredibly misleading term.

Proof of work schemes rely on a problem where it's easy to determine whether an answer is correct, but hard to find the right answer. Each node in the network can guess an answer and then see if they got the right one. Whoever guesses right 'wins'. With a faster processor (especially a GPU or custom hardware), you can make a lost more guesses, so you have a higher probability of winning.

Whoever wins can use their solution to add a new block to the blockchain. Roughly speaking, this means that they can process one transaction. This also lets them charge a small transaction-processing fee, so 'mining' generates new coins because you're paid for processing transactions.

I haven't looked for a while, but last time I checked the entire Bitcoin network was processing around 7 transactions per second, with a power consumption of a modest country. To put this in perspective, a single Raspberry Pi running PostgreSQL can easily handle a couple of orders of magnitude more with a power consumption of a few Watts. If you have three of them, you can set up a replicated cluster and still easily handle a thousand transactions per second (probably more). Visa handles over 20,000 transactions per second, including running a load of fraud detection things.

They aren't doing anything useful, they're just burning energy to play a gambling game where tickets are paid for in electricity and compute power.