Is it? Over time human energy creation and consumption has grown exponentially with technological innovation. Fire to cook meat, a wagon attached to an ox, combustion engines, air conditioning, wireless networks, data centers, etc.

Today you probably consume more energy in a few days than your ancestors whole lives.

Now, we've created distributed, immutable property, something that has never existed before. It turns electricity into value storage. What is the "correct" amount of energy for humans to spend on such a thing?

How much energy maintains the USD's reserve status?

Bitcoin? Yes, it's a useless coin. I wouldn't mind even higher amounts of energy being spent on Monero though.

It's good that Ethereum is moving to proof of stake. Not because of some environmental impact though. Mining is just really expensive, it results in huge fees making the coin almost unusable for normal people.

How much of our global energy usage is spent on poorly implemented ACPI code, Windows drivers, inefficient GPU drivers, etc...

Even better, how much energy is wasted per page view due to inefficient frontend web frameworks?

Seems to me that code is speech, and restricting what one can and can't do with silicon that one owns is absolutely ridiculous.

Not even 1%. The USA alone pollutes a ton more and is always utterly unapologetic about it. Historically I don't think they ever adhered to any global effort or treaty to reduce pollution. You have big entrenched organizations such as the oil industry doing far more damage and nobody messes with them. Not to mention the entire developed world's dependency on China for their borderline useless cheap consumer products.

This concern over the environmental impact of cryptocurrencies is utterly laughable when you figure out the real source of these problems. I guess they're just too powerful to be messed with.