Maybe try this another way, if bitcoin used 1% of worldwide energy would that be too much? Where's the line where you would admit that its been crossed and bitcoin energy use is out of proportion to its utility? 5%? 50%?
Maybe try this another way, if bitcoin used 1% of worldwide energy would that be too much? Where's the line where you would admit that its been crossed and bitcoin energy use is out of proportion to its utility? 5%? 50%?
Anything appears wasteful if you don't appreciate the reward it provides.
Ultimately the market will decide. The bitcoin network pays for the energy it uses, just as the gamer community pays for the energy it uses. If bitcoin isn't worth it's energy use, then it will use less energy as people won't be willing to pay the transaction fees and the miners will be paid less.
There is no consensus for "Bitcoin is bad use of energy" as you're implying.
Energy/electricity use isn't inherently bad. All the different uses of energy cannot be classified in a binary way as either good or bad. But they can be sorted along a spectrum according to their usefulness. Their subjective usefulness to individual people which can then be summed up to some total.
Energy is limited so people/states/businesses prioritize some uses of energy over others in order to optimize their goals. When other people's energy use appears wasteful to you, you're free to point it out and even try to convince them, you might even try to sue them because their use case expels toxic chemicals that you'd rather not inhale. But just calling their use case bad "because it uses energy" sure won't convince them. Because practically everything humans do consumes energy.
At what exact percentage of total energy use the acceptable consumption of Bitcoin lies, no single person can/should decide. As with all purposes it should and will be decided by people collectively (through politics, consumption decisions, cultural discourse, ..) be it 1 % (which I'd say is ok, were Bitcoin to continue functioning for the next 100 years) or 5 % (which I'd personally deem too high for Bitcoin and thus wasteful).