I think you might be the one struggling with it. Calculating value (and its possible future) is actually my job description (I work on risk systems for one of t

I think you might be the one struggling with it. Calculating value (and its possible future) is actually my job description (I work on risk systems for one of the largest banks in the world). If something "provides value" it means it generates net benefit after inclusion of various costs and risks. If we take "provides value for humanity" it means bitcoin would have to make net benefit for humanity. But that is not the case. Almost all people have other as convenient ways to transact money. So we only have actually very small minority of people who see the actual benefit. These are mostly people who use bitcoin not to transact but rather to speculate on it -- they don't benefit on it because it makes transacting easier, it is just a pure game on whether the value of bitcoin is going to go up or down. Another class of people for whom bitcoin creates value are the ones with access to capital, cheap energy and silicon to play the game of burning money for bitcoin. Everybody else (ie. almost all people in the world) is left with no benefits and a disadvantage of worsening environment. The energy must be produced somewhere. Even if the particular MWh for mining was produced from renewable sources, it could have been used to offset some non-renewable MWh, but now is lost to the space. The capacity to produce energy is being wasted. Even if humanity produces 100% energy from renewable resources we are still long way to repairing our environment and that energy could have been used to maybe sequester some CO2. "Normal" coin on normal account does not require so much energy to be burned.