btcd

This is not true. I used to be a professional market maker in Bitcoin. This year, Bitcoin market is relatively calm in at least half of the time, meaning 12 hours out of a 24-hour day, longer than most established equity market. Under these normal conditions, trading $1m worth of Bitcoin moves the market by less than 0.01%.

I think it's fair to blame the marketing mistake. Bitcoin was built for the purpose of making convenient payments. However, it turned out to be an ingenious alternative to gold.

I wish it were labelled cryptoasset instead of cryptocurrency.

In the long-term, the objective nature of Bitcoin should prevail and we'll assess its benefit by whether it is a successful store of value.

That is a side effect, not the purpose. Millionaires can use Bitcoins to move their wealth too. I'd say even for a transaction of $1,000, it is often cheaper to move in Bitcoins.

On the contrary: the purpose of private banks is almost exclusively for billionaires to move their wealth around, while externalising costs to all of us. Many financial market interventions in the past are the society bailing out billionaires who bet irresponsibly and cannot bear reducing themselves to millionaires.

Although interesting in its own right, Bitcoin's energy consumption is in no way a good basis on which to judge its social value.

Bitcoin is fundamentally an asset. A useful analogy is to think of it as gold. Gold can be used to make payments, but it is not convenient. Same goes for Bitcoin. But they are both useful as a robust way of storing value.

Maintaining the Bitcoin network costs energy, but almost nothing else. Given Bitcoin's price history, it's safe to assume that Bitcoin's total energy cost is a tiny fraction of its current market cap of around $150b. Now compare that to the social costs of protecting gold, which probably has an over $7 trillion market cap. Wars were fought and lives lost for its ownership.

In conclusion: a large and liquid crypto asset like Bitcoin provides a much more advanced solution of value storage and transfer than traditional physical assets. Its net social benefits should be orders of magnitudes higher than its energy expenditure.

Bitcoin's main function is store of value, with the additional benefit of being relatively easy to transfer. It is basically a more convenient form a gold.

After all these years of growth, Bitcoin's market cap becomes its own unique edge. One simply cannot transfer significant amount, say tens of millions of dollars, easily in any other crypto currency.

The cost of energy is minuscule compared to alternative means of achieving the same: vaults, guards, banks, lawyers, etc.