I believe the research is useful, but to base an international currency around it with these costs is not
Bitcoin is capable of handling 4 transactions a second. If you've created a financial system that consumes more energy than Argentina and can't actually handle the transaction requirements of a decent sized mall, then I'd begin to wonder what definition of "solid" you're using.
> Also you shouldn't look at it in terms of energy/transaction, the energy consumption isn't a function of transactions.
We can look at energy consumption per block, but there's no way to slice and dice this in a way that doesn't make Bitcoin look like a massive waste of energy compared to competitive systems.