I do not think that this is a hype. It seems to me that a fully decentralized payment system would be of huge value to buyers and sellers.

Don't you agree with this?

Or do you believe that while useful, bitcoin won't be the system that prevails, or that no system like this can prevail because of government and/or special interests?

And on the issue of energy.. The sha256 generation is only to prove that you did invest time into it, and it is not a specific amount of time or energy either, but in relation to the total time spend by ALL miners during the past hours. I'm not saying that you don't know this, but it seems to be a common misconception.