And by the time you finally got those ten $10B plants online, Bitcoin's energy use would have ballooned to some even more absurd number, assuming we do nothing to stop the current trajectory.
To me, that’s a flaw of the charger if it keeps working when no device is connected.
As for TVs and others, we need to mandate a front-facing power switch, because most TVs/devices don’t have one anymore.
Have you ever worked at a big corporation? They pay for some stupid useless shit just because it’s nobody’s job to stop paying for the service.
and who's to judge it was useless? If you're the one paying, then you can make this judgement. Otherwise, you're merely putting your own moral values above someone else's.
If somebody was growing weed indoors, or they're smelting aluminium, then they're not wasting?
Edit: Found one myself: https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index/comparisons
Interestingly gold mining also uses more electricity than Bitcoin mining and that doesn't even include the associated costs of pollution, cleanups etc. Gold also isn't a network that can transfer value. On the other hand some of it is used in industrial applications.
Energy wasted by natural gas flaring is 5.5x more energy than bitcoin consumes. Renewable energy curtailment in China alone (turning generation off because we can't consume it fast enough) is almost enough energy on its own to power all bitcoin miners. https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index/comparisons
It's perfectly fine to have a negative opinion of bitcoin and proof of work, but you're wasting political capital in the fight against climate change when there are much bigger fish to fry against wasteful uses of energy that don't have an army of people, businesses, and even nation states (El Salvador) gearing up to fight you to defend their money.
reward in a currency for which you buy the energy. This takes into account the current btc/eur price in finland, if that's where you buy the energy, and that's not guaranteed to halve either.
But bitcoin is currently about a $1 trillion asset class, and growth of it's price has been slowly logarithmically for years. Most bullish cases suggest an eventual value of $10 trillion (in line with gold) to $100 trillion (in line with global bond market). But it's likely going to take decades (with several halving cycles) to get there.
Unless you're suggesting that it's likely to balloon in value even more and/or fast than that, I don't see mining ever becoming the biggest problem we have to deal with. Especially since bitcoin holders don't see PoW mining as a liability, but as a mission critical feature of the system.