40% of gold consumed is in investments, 50% in jewelry, and 10% in industry, so I'm not totally sure how it works out in terms of energy per unit of gold, but it's likely some mining of gold would be necessary even if you stopped using gold for jewelry and investing. But you could get rid of bitcoin (and other crypto currencies) without any real impact.
perhaps. you could get rid of most of things in our society without much impact, since we basically need food, water and shelter. but lots of things are nice to have, so that's kinda irrelevant
I think cryptocurrencies have very few practical applications at the moment. So getting rid of them would have much less effect than getting rid of gold for example.
yes, that's because they are 10 years old as opposed to 10,000, but I am not sure where you are going with this. At the very minimum, getting rid of them would cause investor losses of hundreds of billions.
gold mining uses a ton of energy, more than bitcoin mining. To the extent that people substitute gold for bitcoin in financial portfolios, this is positive since net energy waste is lower.
It seems like a bad comparison, since you don’t need to mine gold just to move it around. Transferring ownership can be accomplished for the amount of energy it takes to send a small electronic message.