They never claimed Bitcoin had “absolutely no use at all”

The point is that Bitcoin is designed to be inherently power-inefficient. Proof of work systems rely on the work being both difficult to calculate and useless.

Even if Bitcoin transactions went to 0 tomorrow, the system would still consume more energy than Argentina just to keep everyone’s balance.

Worse yet, it the power consumption goes up every year because the system incentivized it.

> Even if Bitcoin transactions went to 0 tomorrow, the system would still consume more energy than Argentina just to keep everyone’s balance.

Do you have to do proof of work when there are no transactions?

My understanding was that the PoW was done to place transactions on the block chain. If nothing has changed, nothing has to be done. The entire system can be offline and archived if we have 0 transactions.

Sure, provided everyone agrees there have been no transactions and what the end result was. The PoW is necessary to ensure this consensus, but it would indeed become obsolete if people found a different way to form a consensus of the final state (ending bitcoin).

I assumed by him saying youtube was 'useful' by serving content and saying bitcoins merely exist, he was implying bitcoins do no useful work at all - simply not true.

The parent claims Bitcoin is not using the power for useful work. Which is entirely true. The vast vast vast majority of electricity for Bitcoin goes to hashing random numbers where the output has no value.