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The energy consumption is priced into the cost of holding and transacting Bitcoins.

I wonder if it is any different with any other thing you pay for. Or if any money you pay for anything ultimately results in energy being used up.

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That is all fine and good, but is it necessary at all (even if some people are willing to pay for it).

At the moment, we don't have anything clearly better. But everyone except the most hardcore Bitcoin maximalists believe some form of Proof-of-Stake will work well enough. PoS will bring along a different suite of problems, but requiring a nuclear power plant's worth of energy will not be one of them.

I would like to bring Open Representative Voting (ORV) into the game. On ORV, every account can freely choose a Representative at any time to vote on their behalf, even when the delegating account itself is offline. These Representative accounts are configured on nodes that remain online and vote on the validity of transactions they see on the network. Their voting weight is the sum of balances for accounts delegating to them, and if they have enough voting weight they become a Principal Representative. The votes these Principal Representatives send out will subsequently be rebroadcasted by other nodes. Open in this context means, that every account can be chosen as a representative by every account.

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