Can you provide a source for how proof of stake only reduces energy usage by "merely an order of magnitude or two"?

No. It's not something I truly care about. I did some back of the envelope math a year or two ago when I looked into proof of stake and then stopped looking into the space altogether after encountering some of the people in the space. That any amount of electricity is being consumed or any amount of e-waste is being generated for the the gambling hobby horse of a small handful of already wealthy individuals is pretty fucking stupid imo.

So, having now established that people who don't care also don't have good sources, let's get back to you, somebody who does actually care. Do you have any sources? If not, why not? "Crypto has rotted my brain" is an acceptable answer, fyi.

I care about crypto (in both senses of cryptography and cryptocurrency), but the amount I care for this conversation is admittedly beginning to wane. There was already another thread where someone cited a source and then went back and forth with you for a bit about the source's potential biases. If you really wanted to estimate the energy consumption yourself, thus verifying all the sources, here's what you could do:

* Sync a copy of the Ethereum blockchain. It should be pretty straightforward to tell if you have a good copy, because that's like, blockchain's whole "thing".

* Pick out the "difficulty" field in the last proof-of-work block header, then divide it into the hashrate and power consumption of typical mining hardware at the time. This gives you the "before" consumption figure.

* Pick out the total number of validators in the latest proof-of-stake block header. Remove validators that share withdrawal addresses, as they are run by the same entity and likely all run on a single piece of hardware (or few).

* Multiply that number of validators by the typical hardware power consumption of an i5 desktop computer with an SSD, which is likely what most of them are running on.

I'll leave that as an exercise for you to not do.

> That any amount of electricity is being consumed or any amount of e-waste is being generated for the the gambling hobby horse of a small handful of already wealthy individuals is pretty fucking stupid imo.

You must hate AAA gaming, then. Same wealthy people, same e-waste being created purely to shuffle pixels around and keep them from being bored. Crypto brought you and me together in this thread, and I'm sure you can agree that we're both entertained, right?