I really don’t get why so many smart people come up with every possible theoretical solution and yet they fail to observe that Bitcoin was engineered to solve this exact problem
There's good reasons why people discuss these ideas, bitcoin, much like anything else is just part of the direction things can go in and it doesn't exist in isolation from the rest of the world.
Much of the world doesn’t own bitcoin but as long as you have a mobile phone and an internet connection, there’s a way to buy some. The technology’s been working for 12 years now and it can scale just fine, no need to tamper with anything. People don’t need to run full nodes, it’s already decentralized enough. I have one running off a raspberry pi and a 1TB hard drive, but it’s just because I want to and not because I think the additional node is needed for the network. Bitcoin is resilient against external actors by design, maximum decentralization and security. Remember when China finally cracked down on all bitcoin mining in May? The hashrate has recovered by now and China lost almost all of its 50% foothold on global bitcoin mining. The rest of the world’s bitcoin miners thanks China for its contribution.
It seems to me like Bitcoin is dismissed too easily by people who haven’t done enough unbiased research on it. For me, it’s not so much that Bitcoin is such an awesome invention and everyone should worship it like a cult. My question is what happens after fiat currencies collapse? Every single government backed currency has collapsed from hyperinflation in the past, and there’s still a good number of countries with hyper inflating currencies today. Historically, after chaos and war, some people’s debts are flushed away at the expense of everyone else and a new currency is issued by the affected jurisdiction. Do we just want to repeat that cycle when the USD collapses? I think that a free market currency that cannot be controlled by any organization (including governments) deserves more limelight.
To actually have wasting energy as the base of a system must be the very definition of shitty engineering.