Implicitly they are arguing the value to people is low compared to energy consumption. They are sickened by the allocation of our limited sustainable energy production to this inefficient endeavour.
Presumably a proof of stake system with energy consumption within a few orders of magnitude of centralized ledgers would not be sickening.
Because money is a collective fiction we can easily "make" using only ideas, while electricity is a real and finite resource, the safe and sustainable generation of which is a primary concern for our future. It feels like a bad trade.
Sure, but if you want it to be _sound_ money, it has to backed by some kind of inherent scarcity or guarantee which implies work and energy expenditure. If you want to be able to store it on a flash drive and transfer it to a different continent with no intermediaries, that too will cost something. If it were 'fictional' enough to be free, it wouldn't be useful.
I don't think that's inherently true. What's required is trust that one hasn't fiddled the numbers, and scarcity of some token is just one way of accomplishing that. Here's a monetary system, not unlike bitcoin:
All transactions occur in the market square, at the Town Ledger. Everyone's balance is public, and every transaction is witnessed by everyone else lining up for their turn at the Ledger. Everyone keeps an eye on their balance and the balance of a few friends. The mayor locks up the Ledger at night of course, but discrepancies tend to get the mayor lynched so she keeps a very close eye on it.
The system started by tracking barters, but it got too confusing to track all the different things, so it was agreed to simply write down a number equivalent to the trade's value in chickens as determined by average exchange rate over all previous transactions - nothing special about chickens, they were just a very commonly traded good which made for well-defined exchange rates.
After a few chicken runs, the villagers agreed to abandon the chicken standard in favor of shiny meteorites that fell from the sky once every ten years. They were technically slightly inflationary, but people lost them from time to time as well so it kind of evened out. Anyway, there weren't many of them around; most transactions were in fractions of a shiny meteor-pebble. It was just a convenient reference.
That’s the question that I never see answered. Presumably if someone is using electricity to mine bitcoins, it’s because they couldn’t use that electricity for something more valuable (including things this commenter would probably consider more wholesome? or “valuable to society”?) like producing food.
Because if there's a direct connection between the amount of electricity used and the amount of money generated, the only logical conclusion is for human society to burn up every possible available ounce of energy as quickly as possible.
Presumably a proof of stake system with energy consumption within a few orders of magnitude of centralized ledgers would not be sickening.