I think you're right that it's not an ideal situation, but humans are not an ideal species. We don't yet live in some Star Trek (or The Orville) world where currency has been abolished and everyone acts altruistically all the time.
Cryptocurrencies might be able to serve as a stop-gap before we figure out how to get there. It keeps everyone honest. In the future, it might even replace the entire tax code. There would be no more fines or punishments, and companies would no longer be able to hide their profits offshore. Taxes could just be automatically collected from each transaction, and managed by some global organization (maybe the UN). The world could even agree on a "basic income" contract that solves inequality.
These are all hypothetical examples, but I think this would be a worthwhile use of electricity. Especially if it's all cheap and renewable energy.
I would actually argue it is very fundamentally different. Once you've dug up your chucks of metal, trading them with others requires very little extra energy to be expended (Especially if we're going to go all the way to talking about actual cash, which is easy to split-up into smaller denominations).
Vs. Bitcoin, which will still require miners to expend the same amount of CPU cycles to keep the network working so you can transfer your Bitcoins to others, even after all of the Bitcoins are mined and the blocks provide no new Bitcoins into the market.
It'd be interesting to see a table of 5 year energy cost from inception of a bar of gold vs. equivalent value of Bitcoin, at various #s of transactions.
"is it a waste of resources, to chop down trees, to then use thousands of gallons of water to turn them into paper, followed by using paint made out of oil extracted from the ground to draw pictures on them, followed by cutting said paper and then using vehicles which again burn oil to deliver said paper, just to have a chunk of it so that you can possibly buy shit?"
Cryptocurrencies might be able to serve as a stop-gap before we figure out how to get there. It keeps everyone honest. In the future, it might even replace the entire tax code. There would be no more fines or punishments, and companies would no longer be able to hide their profits offshore. Taxes could just be automatically collected from each transaction, and managed by some global organization (maybe the UN). The world could even agree on a "basic income" contract that solves inequality.
These are all hypothetical examples, but I think this would be a worthwhile use of electricity. Especially if it's all cheap and renewable energy.