Quite a few people have noted that this is a lot, but there are caveats (how much does the _whole_ banking system use, how much is cryptofinance worth to societ

Quite a few people have noted that this is a lot, but there are caveats (how much does the _whole_ banking system use, how much is cryptofinance worth to society, etc etc). There's a more important point though: you can have cryptocurrencies without this horrendous waste of energy. There are functional cryptocurrencies that are _not_ backed by proof-of-work, and don't have the same catastrophic environment impact. Notable candidates include Stellar (backed by Stripe [1], using a consensus protocol with a distributed web of trusted servers) and Cardono (which includes Ethereum-like functionality, using proof-of-stake). They're newer, and they will evolve further, but they're already functional and dramatically more efficient (by many orders of magnitude). They're not even that niche: Cardono is #4 by market cap & Stellar is #12 [2]. There are interesting arguments for crypto being valuable, but there are very few arguments for Bitcoin or proof-of-work specifically is valuable (and for why the current price isn't a huge bubble). Burning this quantity of power is tragic and totally unnecessary. [1] https://stripe.com/blog/stellar https://stripe.com/blog/stellar [2] https://coinmarketcap.com/ https://coinmarketcap.com/