[keymone]

How is that “worse” though? This is free market at work. Energy being spent securing the bitcoin network will always correlate with value of bitcoin.

The end is existence of bitcoin as solution to fairly important problem of decentralized and censorship-resistant consensus mechanism over open ledger that everybody can transfer value within (and soon with convenient atomic swaps - across multiple chains). And that is just the lowest layer of operation.

Anybody claiming bitcoin mining is wasting energy assumes the solution to said problem is worthless or the problem doesn’t exist. Both of which I (and the market) disagree with.

As for whether there could be more “efficient” way to line bitcoins - this is irrelevant, because for every jump in efficiency there will be similar jump in mining difficulty by design.