> You might understand the "tech", but probably not the economic side.

I have heard every argument you make here. I have been in this space, I have heard the talks, I have heard the economic theories. You are starting from a conclusion that if someone thinks Bitcoin is a waste of energy there must be something they don't understand. But there's another possibility here that you're not considering, which is that maybe Bitcoin actually just didn't work, and the economic theories were wrong.

If that literally can't be a possibility in your head, then I don't know what to say -- this is like talking to Flat Earthers where every experiment has some mitigating factor that means it doesn't count, or there's some phenomenon that means that anyone who thinks the world is round must just be missing some point or must just have not seen some argument. I don't know how to work through someone starting entirely from a conclusion -- that Bitcoin is good and it's not a waste of energy and it accomplishes its goals -- and then working backwards to try and figure out why the conclusion they've already drawn is right.

The possibility you're not considering is that yes, the existing fiat monetary system has tons of problems, and Bitcoin was a cool attempt to build something better. But it just didn't work out. The tech didn't work out, the economic theories didn't end up playing out the way people wanted them to play out, the privacy guarantees didn't hold up, the bandwidth and transaction capabilities didn't scale the way we all wanted them to scale, the energy costs went out of control, and (most importantly) the community behavior didn't match what the founders and early proponents thought would happen. They tried to create a currency and unfortunately failed. They had interesting theories that didn't play out in actual reality.

But sometimes I feel like Bitcoin proponents literally can't envision that as a possibility, they're too invested in the thing and so it's become a leap of faith. Questioning it isn't possible. And I can't think of any better example of that then having someone come into a conversation almost directly saying, "I don't know what you don't understand or where you're going wrong or why you think that Bitcoin is a waste of energy, but you must not know what you're talking about because you reached a different conclusion than me." I don't want to be mean about this, but all I can think about reading this comment is that Youtube documentary where the guy goes into Flat Earth comment sections and systematically walks through an experiment and at the end they just say, "well, we don't know what you did wrong to get a result that indicates the world is round, but you must have done something wrong, try it again until you get a different result."

The reality is that Bitcoin is not working well as a currency. Come up with whatever theories you want about that, but the economic predictions people made about how Bitcoin would be adopted and used... didn't happen. The evidence isn't there. I'm not saying that as a critic, it would have been great if those people had been right, I'd love for there to be a good, privacy-preserving digital currency that works across countries and allows for low-cost microtransactions. But I also have to be honest about when an attempt to build that thing fails.

And continuing to dump energy and resources into a failed attempt to build a currency is a waste of energy. At best it's sunk-cost fallacy preventing people from learning from Bitcoin's mistakes and trying to build something better. At worst it's a speculative confidence game where the tech and theories are irrelevant and the only thing that matters is that the price of the coin (measured in USD, ironically) keep going up.