[deadmetheny]

>Still does not explain how the current banking industry along with others, such as the entertainment industry is not "massively wasteful" by design

a) The entertainment industry is irrelevant to the discussion of Bitcoin vs traditional banking systems. It's a red herring. Cut it out.

b) Bitcoin is using an amount of electricity comparable to the country of Ireland. The banking system might use that much power, but they're doing millions of card transactions a minute - there's actual returns and actual business being done. And literally everything you described is an externality that costs the system money - ATMs exist because they're cheaper than human tellers, the lightposts can use more energy-efficient bulbs, etc etc. None of these are explicitly designed to burn power.

On the other hand, if you add mining power to the pool, it makes it harder to get hashes, using more power. Bitcoin is regressive in its power usages. The traditional system does not actively set out to use more power. While due to inertia it may not make active strides to reduce it, but that's not the point here. It's not by design like Bitcoin is.