Bitcoin doesn't solve any problem yet which is fundamental to our society and a fiat system like the trust issue:
If i exchange 1 bitcoin with you for any service or thing outside of the blockchain, i need the whole proof of stack system protection of our normal existing money infrastructure like lawyers, contracts etc.
And no smart contracts do not solve this issue.
What is left? Small amount of transactions per day with high fees 'but' decentralized infrastructure run by someone we all don't know aggregated probably in data centers owned by big companies.
Compare energy spent on global hash rate to all energy spent by mining metals, physical banking, financial services middle persons, etc. if you want to talk about energy usage and make any kind of sense.
What do you do when you want to exchange 1 bitcoin for 1 car and the person with the car doesn't give you the car after the 'absolut fairness/ security' of transfering bitcoin to their wallet? You go back to our Proof of Stake system. You talk to a lawyer. You expect the police to help you.
The smallest issue in our society is just transfering money from left to right. This is not a hard problem. And pls don't tell me how much easier it is to send a few bitcoins to africa. Most people don't do this and yes western union exists.
Or try to recover your bitcoins. A friend has 100k in bitcoins just doesn't know the password anymore.
What do you do when someone breaks into your home and forces you to give them your bitcoin key? Yes exactly anonyms moving of money from you to them. Untraceable, wow what a great thing to have!
And no Satoshi 'himself' is not an expert in global economy. He just invented bitcoin and you can cleary see how flawed it is.
you're ending up with the entire rest of civilisation on the other side of that
* Bitcoin, 0.5% of all energy use: 7 transactions per second total worldwide
* THE ENTIRE REST OF CIVILISATION AND EVERYONE IN IT AND EVERYTHING THEY DO, 199x the energy use, really quite a lot more than 1,393 transactions per second worldwide, and all the other stuff civilisation does too
What an amazing comparison for you to suggest.
Thats so fun because apparently everyone doing bitcoin does it for a different reason.
Anyway do you believe that when the world goes down and you need your gold, you will be able to use bitcoin?
Yes. But the point I'm making is, none of that benefits from waste. The waste is something everyone want to reduce. With Bitcoin, the trend is uniquely opposite, because the crypto system is secured through aggregate waste being way larger than any actor or group can afford.
Value is a subjective concept. One could argue that its value is that arbitrary quantities of it cannot be created by dictat.
> - to be able to allow exchanging value, it fundamentally requires ever increasing waste, as the waste is what gives its mathematical guarantees.
One could argue that it takes a lot worse to maintain any currency such as USD as a currency. Full force of government law enforcement will be unleashed on you if you decide to have your own currency. There is a lot of "wastage" that goes to safeguard currency creation and storage and to prevent counterfeiting.
I do not hold BTC. Nor do I trade it. But to discuss as if other currencies have no cost is not rational.