You are being extremely rude by calling my comment disingenuous, it's your parochial thinking which seeks perfection from an asset from the onset and cannot comprehend that asset classes can mature, if you cannot hold a conversation properly do not reply at all. All emerging technologies undergo Gartner cycles. Perhaps, you haven't heard what happens when a financial system continuously prints money, does the Venezuelan Bolivar ring a bell? I did not say it will combat inflation, I said it's a hedge against inflation, perhaps you could take a look at the charts of dollar index and Bitcoin and contemplate on the exact counter reflection that they are.
Not moving any goal posts here, I just meant to say that some part of the energy usage is renewable, and we as mankind have been moving towards more energy consumption each year anyway. In the coming years, we'll start using more renewable energy.
As far as the question what are you good for is concerned, we've been printing money at an alarming rate ever since 2008 crisis, if the new stimulus is passed, the us will have printed 40% of all dollars in existence in the past year alone, I don't know how you think that won't cause inflation/it's acceptable that the cost of printing is borne by other countries because the us dollar is the international reserve currency. Bitcoin has been adopting a store of value narrative and is synonymous with digital gold at this point, so in effect a hedge against inflation.
Two, I'm not sure if you relate with it or not, but maybe we just believe in decentralization of financial institutions just a little bit more than you do, everyone who got burned because of banks in the past decade has developed a deep distrust of the modern financial system.
This isn't exactly an rebuttal to your argument, but 74% of energy that Bitcoin used to power it's network was renewable energy [1], that's more than you can say for most countries. While the network itself is inefficient, I think the philosophy of "why bitcoin", is always amiss in these arguments. Everything can be made more efficient.
Edit: 39% of energy used is renewable, not really sure how that doesn't matter.
Seeing the name of Pedro domingos and how he got cancelled for expressing his views in the recent incident involving Google and timnit gebru, makes me think it's probably related to that.