That "probably" is really more of a "maybe" given the experience with the current big accelerators, and really needs to be weighed against the extreme costs - and other, more promising avenues of research.

> If we are going to insist on "Absolutely not" path, we should start with proof-of-work crypto farms and AI datacenters which consume county or state equivalents of electricity and water resources for low quality slop.

Who exactly is the "we" that is able to make this decision? The allocation of research budgets is completely unrelated to the funding of AI datacenters or crypto farms. There is no organization on this planet that controls both.

And if you're gonna propose that the whole of human efforts should somehow be organized differently so that these things can be prioritized against each other properly, then I'm afraid that is a much, MUCH harder problem than any fundamental physics.