Energy use by traditional banking is not at all comparable. Banks have none of the properties Bitcoin was envisioned to provide. Fundamentally, bitcoin is not even a bank, it's more like cash. It makes no sense to compare the two.

That energy usage is supposed to buy us a monetary system that's completely independent of government. Uncensorable, untraceable, unsanctionable, anonymous, the works. It literally doesn't matter how much energy it uses, as long as those properties are achieved. The problem is BTC failed at all of them. It really is a waste to spend all this energy mining BTC when better projects like Monero exist.

How is it not directly comparable? People use cash, checks, wire transfers, credit cards, etc. to make or receive payments all of the time. There's no reason why you can't compare those from the user's perspective — if I want to buy a cup of coffee, how long does it take, how much does it cost, how hard is it, etc.?

> It literally doesn't matter how much energy it uses, as long as those properties are achieved.

This is like saying it doesn't matter how slow it is as long as your computing machine is Turing complete. It doesn't matter if you achieve those properties on an unworkable system and it especially isn't true that more than a tiny fraction of people value them above cost or utility — a drug deal might care a lot about untraceable but the average person doesn't care enough to pay more or use something inconvenient.

> How is it not directly comparable?

Because banks were never supposed to provide untraceable, uncensorable, unsanctionable, anonymous transactions. They do the opposite.

Cryptocurrencies are not banks. They're coins. Analogous to cash which also allows for private transactions. Cryptocurrency is an attempt to create a digital cash system. It has nothing to do with banks.

> the average person doesn't care enough to pay more or use something inconvenient

Yes, this is why bitcoin failed. Normal people can't transact with it. The world will not change until everyone is transacting in cryptocurrency, leaving USD and all other currencies behind.

Don't forget that "the traditional banking system" requires large standing armies and navies. The reason random countries can't print dollars is that there are 20 aircraft carriers floating around the world ready to bomb them back into the barter age. That cost has to be factored in.

No, it really doesn't. The army defends the nation and currency is an emergent property of the nation, but the army isn't out there with guns making sure people accept dollars. If you switched to Bitcoin and killed the US dollar, the army would still be needed to protect the country, to protect America's business interests abroad, its political interests abroad and its people. That would be true even if the currency was old shoelaces. The US army long predates the fiat dollar by about 200 years and there is absolutely, indisputably, no path to reducing cost or energy expenditure on the army when switching to a different currency.

Countries that use other countries currencies (in the way El Salvador uses the US Dollar) still have armies and some countries that use their own fiat dollars (Japan, Iceland) have no armies.

These two are uncorrelated.

Unless there's some straight line between, say, switching to Bitcoin and Xi Jinping realizing Taiwan was always its own country and grabbing some Baijiu with Tsai Ing-wen. I'm very excited to find out how Bitcoin solves the Hong Kong situation too! And I suppose it'll take care of business in the Sudan? Finally that trip to Yemen is back on the table. C'mon now...

That's a very reductive view ignoring all of the other things which depend on governments. For example, most cryptocurrency users depend on having functional police and court systems, the open internet, etc. — do we add that to their costs as well?