Oh sure, buying fresh berries imported by plane from the other side of the world is no better than this bitcoin mining business! But it's not a competition to single out the worst offender.

I feel the parent comment shares this common intuition that there must be some way to design and code any crytocurrency to offer the same features without having to consume so much energy in the process.

I'm no expert on cryptocoins but we surely can agree that any hope to see them mainstream won't rely on countless power plants to brute force computational puzzles.