That was the pitch of crypto. In practice, people are buying it as a bet that it will go up. I suspect most people are only buying it because the value is going up. If bitcoin actually worked like a currency and traded between $8k and $12 for the past 5 years, no one would care.
Banks obviously don't use anywhere near this much energy. Bitcoin is estimated to use more energy than all other server farms put together.
So we are using 0.6% of the world's energy to store 0.5% of the world's wealth. And < 0.6% of the world's energy to store the other 99.5% of the world's wealth.
Doesn't seem like the ideal wealth storage technology.
It takes a relatively minuscule amount of energy to maintain a database of numbers associated with certain people and entities, but quite a significant amount to make it mean something.
I find it much more likely that military resources would be diverted to somewhere upstream of mining in the value chain. For example, if we continue relying on carbon-intensive proof-of-work blockchains, why wouldn't armies simply be diverted to secure energy resources?
Either way, it’s very convoluted and tough to tease out line item costs, but I don’t think comparing electricity usage is a good proxy.
It also implies that the goal of storing wealth is optimizing for low energy usage, which seems less important than security/safety, ease of transfer, taxation, automation, and other factors.
I’m not making an argument for or against PoW. Just want to point out it’s possible >.6% of humans energy output may in fact go towards banking and payments.
Given that we are nearing the irreversible destruction of our climate and that existing electronic systems offer all the benefits you mention, but with massively lower energy cost, your claim that energy “seems less important” is unsupported.
The US doesn't even use 20% of the world's energy. So you would need to think that 125% of the energy the US produces and consumes goes directly into fighting wars and "supporting the petro dollar" - which is absurd. Almost 50% of energy is spent on transportation and utilities alone...
In the most generous of worlds, Bitcoin is 10x less efficient than the current systems. It is probably closer to 1000x less efficient (or more).
This is one of the biggest selling points of crypto, it’s not tied to a government that may decide to commit mass murder for its sake.
The idea behind this proof-of-work scheme is that creating an alternative blockchain history becomes prohibitively expensive, pushing the network to achive a distributed consensus. However, it's tremendously wasteful because the energy isn't actually being spent on "useful" work.
Although higher prices make larger mining operations more enticing and profitable.
It's even worse in terms of energy per transaction.
But the success of BNB which is basically just a corporate database on a blockchain shows there is a big part of the community that doesn't care about decentralization at all.