How much does it cost to create a US dollar, to be able to have transactions with it? Did it take 100 years of faith in the US credit to establish that? How much energy was that?
All that's relevant is what it costs now or else we're going back to the beginning of the universe
In truth, if I factor in the establishment of the United States and several hundred years of money policy, it'll be higher. But for a fair comparison with Bitcoin, that'd be unfair, right? Because the US's money policy is obviously historically tied to Britain's, so I should include that too. And Britain was adapting the system that was established in feudal times. A lot of work went into making fiat currency real.
So a fair comparison would be Bitcoin versus the cost to print money, plus the history of the US currency system, UK, and all of monetary history before that. This is starting to look pretty bad!
Would the U.S. Treasury disappear if we switched to Bitcoin? (Hint: look at countries that don't have their own currency. They still collect taxes and spend and borrow money.)