fabstei

A concrete counterexample: plantura.garden is a large, reputable German-language gardening magazine / brand, and probably exactly the kind of legitimate site one would expect on .garden.

So while the abuse numbers may well justify treating newly registered / low-reputation .garden domains with suspicion, blanket-blocking the entire TLD seems like it would create real collateral damage.

It's the line of credit the UBS allegedly secured from the Swiss national bank

No. Their only purpose is to act as a kind of receipt: "look, I actually really did waste all this energy".

The solution to the puzzle itself is irrelevant - it's an operation that would be extremely simple but that's made very, very hard on purpose. And the sole purpose is to align incentives by using lots of energy.

Buy Me a Coffee tells exactly the kind of story that DLT (blockchain) startups often tell - connect creators with their fan base etc., just the "let's cut out the middlemen" is obviously missing.

I totally get why you'd go for Stripe to build a mature, scalable product open to as many users as possible. But just out of curiosity: did you spend some time thinking about DLT to cut out middlemen, did you actively decide against it, are you experimenting with it - what's your stance?