There is no value generation in trading stocks either beyond IPO, as stocks are then simply second-hand markets and can be completely irrational. The main value is just like the lottery : entertainment, excitment.
The only winners are the market makers and the ones initiating insider trading. You'll always be on the wrong is of the liquidity when trying to ride alongside scammers.
The betting contract depended on the Oracle's data for resolution. The Oracle's data was altered. The betting contract wasn't altered, however the social contract was.
You would be surprised at how efficient cryptocurrency mining is compared to other ways of storing value. And most improvements happen to reduce the overall cost of securing value (PoS, PoST, etc)
Proof of work allows for what Keynes called "Bancor". BTC is succesful because unlike fiat central banks, the money supply isn't dictated by interest rates (and thus loans) but by the effort of participants. The price of BTC is almost irrelevant, BTC itself is a paradigm shift.
Regarding the fixed supply, it's only fixed because participants agree to the consensus algorithm that fixes it. Many cryptocurrencies have different tokenomics, such as ETH's rules under PoS. BTC miners could vote onchain for a hard fork to change the 21M cap - or another solution.
There are mechanism in place to prevent attacks, that require more than 51% control of staked ETH. The team behind ETH probably stayed on PoW for a long time to build the market cap such as to make attacks unlikely by the sheer amount of capital required.
There was a proposal on Ethereum that didn't succeed (progpow) since they were already in the late stage of transitionning to PoS. Ethereum did quite a good job at keeping asic advantage moderate (the speedup was 100% max - not orders of magnitude). RandomX is basically progpow that succeeded. You might be interested in Chia's Proof of Space and Time... and how it collapsed!
Not all bars have the same "type" of people. Also if you're looking for camaraderie or friendship, it's a pretty good place to have talks of all kind - the silly ones are the best!