[CryptoPunk]

Exactly. Proof of work is costly in energy and affordable in labor. The energy consumption of labor-intensive industries obfuscates the real energy requirements of those industries, by effectively outsourcing the energy consumption to the workers.

I still prefer Ethereum's variation of Proof of Stake over Proof of Work, but it's by no means clear to me that Proof of Work based blockchains are less resource-efficient than traditional financial systems, and I would wager a comprehensive analysis would show in fact that they have the potential to be vastly more efficient, if they're allowed to scale up their transaction throughput to amortize their energy consumption across more numerous transactions.

[Nursie]

Proof of work does not replace labour though. There is not really an equivalent outlay in tradtional banking. And blockchains don't provide the services that the labor provides in the banking sector.

This is just more nonsense.

[CryptoPunk]

Proof of work completely replaces the bureaucracy that maintains trust in traditional ledgers..

A bunch of automated nodes, strewn across the globe, and connected via the internet, maintain the network, with the network being able to seamlessly/autonomously manage nodes joining/leaving.

There are no legal contracts that need to be drawn up, filled out and signed for someone to start submitting PoW, or validating and propagating transactions, to the network. There is no HR department. No payroll. Just machines, and a deterministic compensation mechanism, managed by a fault tolerant network of machines.