Bitcoin / Bitcoins / Crypto Currency

I find the 'Bitcoin-energy-usage-equals-X-country' argument pretty tiring
...
All feels a little besides the point, on a macro scale...

Doesn't that miss the point too though?

There's a purpose to mining gold. It's useful for making things.
Banks leaving the lights on is definitely a waste, but there was a reason to have the lights in the first place.

Bitcoin is solving hard maths problems for no purpose other than to create the coin. If the work being done was protein folding, or weather prediction (ignoring the irony), and you got a token to show you'd done the work and that entitled you to a % of a bitcoin then you could argue that the the mining itself was more than an exercise in vanity.

I definitely don't know what I'm talking about compared to the Stonehenges on the thread, but I've yet to be convinced that Bitcoin isn't a shitshow on a number of levels.

I wonder how many countries-worth of carbon emissions global gold extraction equals?

Gold only has to be dug up once and then can sit in a vault while being used in any number of transactions. The initial cost is increasingly spread across those transactions, in this sense. BTC's cost per transaction, on the other hand, increases constantly.

Or how much electricity is squandered by global banks leaving their lights on over the weekend?

1. Again, a tiny cost compared to the total cost of BTC.
   
2. When you spread it across the number of transactions those banks carry out, compared to the relatively tiny number of BTC transactions, it becomes microscopic.
   
3. Fiat currency doesn't depend upon office lights being turned on.
   
4. Banks actually do a lot more than create and store fiat currency. Despite what the more delusional members of the cryptocurrency community think, if the world switched to cryptocurrencies tomorrow, there would still be banks.
   
   

All feels a little besides the point, on a macro scale...

BTC's energy costs are on a bloody macro scale.