Gold mining completely destroys large tracts of land, poisons enormous water supplies and leaves huge areas completely uninhabitable for basically ever.
Gold mining has polluted 40% of US rivers and 50% of lakes.
If Bitcoin could replace gold’s store of value use case and environmental footprint, it would be a massive win for the environment.
https://www.gao.gov/blog/gold-rush-rot-lasting-environmental...
Most use of gold is speculative as a store of value, some is decorative, and a little bit is actually used to build products.
> Bitcoin itself is not required for a transaction, any other form of currency could replace it.
Of course, for transactions. But people don't want to use national currencies as a store of value. For good reasons.
If we could replace gold with bitcoin as the store of value, it'd be a net positive.
Bitcoins energy input is used to protect the monetary energy it contains from being stolen, by anyone. The value in the monetary units of fiat currencies is continuously being stolen through supply inflation which dilutes the same value across more units, halving the value every decade. This is what always happens when money is proof-of-work for most, but not for a select few who can create it effortlessly (the banking system).
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
What is money if it's not proof of work?
Gold mining provides a resource that is used to build other products.
Bitcoin itself is not required for a transaction, any other form of currency could replace it. The mining provides no value, it is not a good usage of the compute power. Evening finding ET would be better than what it’s currently doing. That power could be used for all kinds of things, versus solving a block of data with trial and error.