To me, electronic cash is far from the first thing on the chopping block when we look at the sheer wastefulness of our society.
Maybe the externalities should be priced into the cost of energy so that we don't have to conduct these witchhunts on how others spend their energy, like whether they use a dish washer or clothes dryer or A/C. Seems inconsistent to me.
We are comparing the energy consumption of crypto currencies vs regular money. From what I read (granted, not much), Bitcoin would not scale to the current usage of regular money.
From [1]:
"Digiconomist compared bitcoin's network energy consumption to another payment system like Visa. It reports that bitcoin consumed the equivalent energy of nearly 2.8 million U.S. households, while Visa's consumption numbers around 50,000 U.S. households."
"That's about 0.13 percent of total global electricity consumption, according to Digiconomist. That would rank bitcoin as 61st if it were its own country."
"Bitcoin mining uses more electricity than […] Ireland or Nigeria."
"Nearly 10 U.S. households can be powered for one day by the electricity consumed for a single bitcoin transaction"
Nothing remotely comparable to using a dishwasher. And all this is considering that very few people use Bitcoin.
> how others spend their energy
It's not a problem at the individual level. It's not "other spending their energy". It's people spending everybody's resources. This cannot be solved with money.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bitcoin-mining-energy-consumpti...
The Cambridge bitcoin electricity consumption index is probably a more superior and realistic model.
Yes it uses electricity, (what doesn't these days), but it is often renewable and excess power that would otherwise not be used e.g Hydro in China.
So it's not as bad as it seems, doesn't mean it can't be improved, but electricity consumption is not the issue digiconomist makes it out to be.