I can send unlimited amounts of money, anywhere on earth, for (at most) dollars in a few seconds. I don't need to rely on any government for any reason, and no government can stop me.
When theorizing about societal/political benefits, take into account the societal/political problems cryptocurrencies created by inventing a machine that allows converting resources directly into money of miners' digital wallets without regulation.
Your sending any amount of money, actual practicality and realizability aside, comes at the cost of a lottery, where miners perform literally 100.000.000.000.000.000.000 computations per second whose outcome is completely thrown away, unless they are lucky enough to be one of the 6 computations per hour that win. This cannot be made more efficient: If computing one hash costs less energy, the difficulty will be adjusted to require more calculations to keep the target of 6 hashes per hour.
By the decentralized property of cryptocurrencies, it is by design not possible to regulate where the energy for this lottery is coming from.
Many other Proof of Stake blockchains like Cosmos have been live and working fine for years.
I have many other doubts against the usefulness and sensibility of blockchains in general, e.g. I have doubts how smart contracts actually succeed to reach their goals in a reality where humans make mistakes and courts are used to settle disputes and ambiguities. But these concerns then only affect the viability of technologies that I and others are not forced to participate in.
Proof-of-work on the other hand, as long as it continues to exist, affects everyone in that in incentivizes burning resources directly for money without regulation, no matter how dirty or wasteful.
That said, I think everyone should be able to buy electricity and spend it on what they want, even dumbfuck videogames that waste their life away. If we play the "your electricity is bad, my electricity is good" game then it leads to the majority restricting the minority.
Instead, we should price electricity based on externalities and let purchasers use it as they want. If electricity is 100% clean and the buyer chooses to mine bitcoin, that's their value decision, just as you playing videogames is your (very stupid) decision, but I support your right to waste electricity on it.
That being said, I still see proof of stake and proof of coverage as interesting way to maintain said ledger integrity in the like… 3 actually existing use case where a blockchain is superior to a SQLite instance with good security.
https://support.circle.com/hc/en-us/articles/213560643--Iden...
You have to account for transaction fees into cryptocurrency, the blockchain transaction fee itself, and the conversion into the target local currency.
You left 2/3rds of that process out, conveniently.
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