> Transactions on LN are almost as secure as regular transactions onchain

Almost being the key word there.

> LN routing is similar to onion routing that is used in TOR.

You should look into this more, not all routing on Lightning Network goes over Tor today, I think the highest numbers I've seen are around 50%, although maybe it's grown a bit since I last checked. And importantly, every hop in a Lightning Network transaction needs to be paid. I have heard so many people talk about Lightning Network multi-hop transactions or disposable channels like they're a silver bullet for privacy while failing to point out that all of these privacy mitigations cost extra money and there's a strong incentive for users not to pay extra for privacy.

> I find blockchain much better for privacy than having to trust my credit card details with actual PII to various companies.

I've experimented with crypto exchanges, and I had to provide them all with a frankly obscene amount of PII to set up accounts. For the mainstream average user who isn't exchanging coins in private or setting up their own exchanges, moving money into and out of the system using popular providers requires giving up a ton of data. And importantly, when you do give up that data it's then associated with a wallet that you transact with on that exchange, which the exchange can then use to track all of your coins that you associate with that wallet.

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> I think it would even be comparable to the amount of PC gamers worldwide.

I promise you this isn't the case, take a look at the average concurrent users on Steam -- not even just the number of people who have an account, the number of people actively playing games at the same time at any given moment. And that's before we ever factor in other PC storefronts, or consoles, or mobile phones, or web games. Zero chance that the number of people using cryptocurrency is the same as the number of people who play games. Zero chance that it's even the same as only the number of people who play PC games, even if we ignore the rest of the market.

And remember, if you do ignore the rest of the gaming market, the energy comparison between cryptocurrency and gaming starts to look a lot worse because PCs only make up a portion of the gaming power consumption you're trying to compare to.

> Gold mining also consumes much more energy than Bitcoin mining, but nobody seems to be upset about it or really care.

Er, no. People are upset about mining, particularly in environmental movements. No one is really giving gold a free pass. See also diamonds. This stuff gets criticized all the time, evil unethical mining is practically a media trope at this point.

> Does anyone care that gamers consume X amount of energy for their entertainment? No, because that's not what people normally do.

Okay, so first of all, people also do care about this, it's a strong motivator behind efforts to make consoles more power efficient and to work on power consumption and battery life. It also plays pretty heavily into the right to repair movement. Both Microsoft and Sony have gotten criticism over broken low-power modes in their consoles, and practically every piece of hardware in a modern gaming setup will be looking at energy standards during its production.

But second of all, it's not a double standard to say that one of the largest entertainment industries in the world is allowed to consume more power than a niche currency that isn't being used as a currency by most people -- because again, it is servicing more people. If I and 3 other people go out and start driving around in a new automobile that spits out the equivalent carbon of the entire rest of the transportation industry, we can't point at the entire rest of transportation industry and say, "see, transporting millions of people uses the same amount of energy as transporting the 4 of us, so it's just double standards to criticize us over our energy use."

Cryptocurrency is niche, extremely niche compared to other entertainment industries and currency systems. It's not a workable system or environmental standard for niche products to consume the same amount of power as mainstream products that service many times as many people. It's very reasonable for people to point out that small groups of people are using disproportionately more power, particularly if those people are trying to expand those power-hungry systems, and particularly if those systems are set up in such a way that they are naturally inclined to use as much power as possible.