However, the true answer is always greed.
If bitcoin helped solve cancer or some genetic diseases, I doubt anyone would say: "yea but it uses too much electricity!". The world is based on trade-offs, so why not have that electricity that the bitcoin network generate be used to solve actual real world problems?
I'm pretty certain that if you evaluate mining and exchange activity, very little of it is impacting areas where it can effect real change (like Hong Kong or Venezuela).
For example, here's a report from the trenches on Venezuela:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/dht1qw/venezuela_u...
For the disaster that is that economy, only 0.004% of global BTC volume is taking place there (yes, that's the correct number of zeroes) Put another way, it represents about 0.08% of Venezuela's GDP.
Who is not a pragmatist? Who could possibly insist on the impractical? This is ideological par excellence and the rejection of the impractical becomes, in a sense, ideology in itself. This ideology necessarily starts to reject criticism as "dogmatic" and this insistence and opposition to opposition becomes in itself a dogmatic principle.
