Every Bitcoin defender repeats this line, but I never see any numbers. Whatever the energy use is, it's provably less than Bitcoin by any metric like transaction volume or market cap, by the simple fact that if you were to scale up Bitcoin's energy use for comparison to the world financial system, it would use magnitudes more energy than humans produce.
https://docsend.com/view/adwmdeeyfvqwecj2
However, it's a terribly bad faith argument.
Essentially, they wrap up everything that isn't involved with ledger maintenance (ATM power, data center power for running the website, Air conditioning at branches power usage) and compare that to Bitcoin, which is only doing ledger maintenance. They do that, because if you had a true apples to apples comparison, you'd end up with kwh of power usage. That's because a ledger is computationally cheap to maintain over a trust network. We were able to do that in the 70s with servers that had no more power than today's raspberry pis.
And how do we know it's garbage? Because if banks stopped doing their own ledgers and instead did everything through bitcoin, would their power usage drop? Absolutely not. They'd still have branches, ATMs, and data centers running their websites. In fact, some banks do manage BTC. Do those banks have lower power footprints compared to like banks without BTC? Absolutely not.
You weren't able to send value from one part of the world to another in minutes without an intermediary for a tiny fraction of the transaction amount in the 70's and you still can't do it today without crypto.
You go through two intermediaries with crypto. One to turn your chinese currency into crypto, then another to turn the crypto into us currency.
It's like somebody at the bottom of the Ponzi scheme defending it to death because someday, maybe, just maybe, he'll rise to the top...
There are people living under governments that don't allow their citizens access to the global financial system (i.e. capital controls) and are often living in high inflation environments. Storing their wealth in an unseizable asset, even $100 worth, means that they are decoupled from their government financially and can escape their hell hole with their wealth in tact.
Inflation is theft. Crypto prevents this theft.
You mean the crypto that just lost 30% of it's value? Literally the topic of the article. THAT crypto is an inflation defense?