Nationstate backed fiat currencies require enormous amounts of energy waste in the form of standing armies and other tools of power. Compared to the energy Bitcoin uses to protect itself from attack or fraud this energy is very large.
If anything, a powerful standing army is more likely to result in failure of fiat currency (hyperinflation)--hyperinflation is fundamentally caused by a government pursuing really bad economic policies to the detriment of the economy, and the failing economy will tend to precipitate an internal (potentially violent) rebellion if there is space to do so.
nations will continue regardless of currency.
nations will always have different levels of resources.
nations will need to defend those resources.
this has nothing to do with electricity used in current electronic financial transactions.
bitcoin and it's ilk are wildly fantastically inefficient.
Seeing as how I can't retrieve the computing power back out of Bitcoin that was mined, it is a cost.
Another example of this is gold. To extract it out of the ground, you need to invest energy. That energy is then "stored" in the gold. You can release it by selling it for USD, then purchasing service from someone and so on.
I think it's hard to argue that the energy you put into it is lost even if that seems unintuitive at first glance.
The only currencies which exhibit that feature (no energy put in, hence no real intrinsic value) are fiat currencies, which come with their own set of unique issues.
My understanding is that a currency needs to be backed by something intrinsically (seen as) valuable as it goes through the bootstrapping process. Once it is generally accepted, it can stand on its own (at least for a while).
No matter how big Bitcoin is, it can never get off of its "gold standard" -- i.e. the computing power required to mine it.
On its own, this would be fine, but the parallels break down very quickly when we are talking about new *coins coming out at a MUCH higher velocity than traditional currencies.
Maybe I misunderstand your issue about getting the energy back out. For me it's quite clear that you can get it out, simply by exchanging it for something else that provides you with that energy.
Fiat currencies tend to devalue to a point where there's literally nothing left of the energy that it originally represented. E.g. the USD devalued by more than 96% since 1913. In my point of view, this really is the currency which you can't extract the energy back out of — with a government guarantee.
I think Ethereum is a step in the right direction compared to Bitcoin since it is backed by usable computation, but it is still overpriced.
BTC inflation is currently higher than USD
Historically, Bitcoin started off as a hyperinflationary mint in order to produce the supply rapidly before the general public would be able to access the production methods.
Aprox 4.11% of Bitcoin users (addresses) control 96.53% of all bitcoins in circulation. Also there's a chance that something will make Bitcoin obsolete in the near future - immediately destroying the trade value of Bitcoin, either a new cryptocurrency, a quantum computer or cryptographic breakthrough that would allow theft of BTC private keys or more predictably a bug like what recently happened in the main Bitcoin core wallet client software which allowed a user to inflate the supply of Bitcoins past 21 million and mint more BTC for free.
Here’s an explanation on how the Bitcoin market differs vastly from Gold speculation markets:
While I respect these people for their great expertise on the general economy, I don't agree with their take on crypto. They obviously misunderstand its nature and, to be frank, during the crypto boom they sometimes appeared to be a bit threatened by the rise of crypto (one of their core businesses is — you guessed it — gold).
With regard to your other points:
* Yes, you can create new altcoins out of thin air, but do you really think that will be possible forever? There are strong network effects at play and — as with any other market — there will be winners and losers. So far Bitcoin has oscillated around the 50% dominance mark. I don't see that changing in the near future. Saying that you can indefinitely create new alts is like saying that you can create unlimited Amazon clones. While technically true, this does not work in reality.
* Yes, inflation is built into Bitcoin, but in contrast to fiat it will not go on forever. Eventually it's a deflationary currency.
* According to the NYT the richest 1% in the US hold more wealth than the "bottom" 90%. This pattern seems to have nothing to do with Bitcoin, although I'd personally wish it would look different.
* Yes, there might be fraud and maybe there are also severe bugs. But up to now, Bitcoin has survived all tests in the field and appears to be pretty stable. Probably more stable than most other pieces of software I have ever seen.