An enormously larger amount of energy is spent keeping the lights on at the legacy banking institutions, and compared to banking peers the mining community is actually more likely to use high efficiency renewables like geothermal to power their enterprises.
It is important to remember it isn’t a ‘waste’ to maintain a currency that the government cannot abrogate by force, or print at their whim and thereby devalue.
US dollars will continue to decline in value relative to Bitcoin because the U.S. monetary authorities will never stop inflating the currency to buy votes with dollars they refuse to tax.
“An enormously larger amount of energy is spent keeping the lights on at the legacy banking institutions”
that may be, but legacy banking is the financial grease that makes the world economy go round, whereas crypto has repeatedly proven that it’s only real use case is as a gambling mechanism, a mechanism for defrauding punters out of their real money, and as a mechanism for terrorists and criminals to evade legacy banking financial controls ...