>It's not misleading at all. It's important to consider that a large group of human operators, using a separately large set of semi automated processes, are a large component of the current energy spend of aggregate financial activity - all those busy worker bees are using energy.

A lot of that is compliance though. Some (or maybe even most, I'm not in the industry) of that doesn't need to exist for the system to function - the banking system would work just fine without suspicious activity reports. I don't think it's an apples to apples comparison as these checks don't and can't exist in cryptocurrency.

That's just scratching the tip of the iceberg, as mentioned above the traditional financial system provides lots of services that cryptocurrencies can't provide or don't provide at any meaningful scale.