For what its worth, this is a difficult concept for most people to understand. I've held crypto since the early days, went to ethereum believing in POS, then crypto "3.0", and only now have I returned realizing what it all meant. Granted most people barely understand how the economy today works, many times out of denial.

Same. I've only recently (mid-2021) deeply understood the implications of Bitcoin, despite hearing about it in 2009, buying some in 2013, and losing some in the MtGox hack. Clearly I'm a slow learner.

I think people are vastly underestimating the impact of Bitcoin embedding itself within the energy sector, and providing an accessible and permissionless escape hatch to millions (billions?) of people whose currencies are hyper-inflating.

> The amount of energy consumed by the network will continue to increase, as it should, as it secures more wealth.

this is very apt. after exhausting the worlds resources guarding our money from each other maybe we'll reflect that it was money that was the bad idea and bitcoin was just an implementation detail

Money is just a psychological-technology that vastly improves efficiency of trade.

It's not exactly feasible to return to a barter system, unless you have some other way of solving the "double coincidence of wants" problem?

One of the innovations of Bitcoin is that it serves purely as a monetary good, so there's no other demand for it outside of it serving its role as money. Counter that with gold which has many other applications.

To be fair, fiat achieved this too, but it came with disastrous trade-offs...

Bitcoin consumes far less energy than gold or banking at full adoption, Overall this is an environmental improvement.

But is the Kilowatt dollar idea based on irrevocably wasting the energy, i.e. on useless hash puzzles?

"Wasted" is a value judgement. Miners put the effort in to procure the energy and then choose to spend it on hashes. It is by definition not wasted.

You know Christmas lights in the USA use up more energy than the Bitcoin network does for the same period? Is that "wasted"? Ultimately that's up to the spenders of that energy to decide.