Plenty of things with "no value" use electricity, but these other things don't use electricity in an adversarial way related to it's monetary cost.
Let's take the example of video games: bitcoin uses about 150TWh of electricity. From EIA.gov's stats, it looks like residential computer usage is estimated at 36 TWh across the usa (2.4% of residential usage, 1.5T kWh residential [0]). Let's assume all residential computer usage is video games, so it's using a nice 1/4th bitcoin.
So, what's different about these uses? Well, let's say that we manage to make electricity 5 times cheaper by, say, building a fusion reactor or a ton of solar panels. In that scenario, those computers playing video games still use the same amount of electricity, and their power bill goes down. Not a problem for computers/games.
However, if the price of electricity goes down, that's actually a problem for bitcoin. Bitcoin is using 150TWh of electricity, which sorta means to perform a 51% attack, you need 75TWh of electricity (I know, it's more complicated than that). Now that electricity is 5 times cheaper, cool, someone can attack bitcoin for 5 times cheaper right? Well, we can't have that, so bitcoin now has to use 750TWh to have the same security it had before.
The same thing happens for improvements to ASICs or any other improvements pretty much. If bitcoin is cheaper to mine, that just means more mining happens and the cost of mining stabilizes back out.
On the other hand, if a game can be optimized to take less electricity, or use fewer servers, of course that'll happen. Like in almost any venture, accomplishing the same work for cheaper is good when it comes to video games.
That is the difference I see. Crypto isn't just wasteful, it's adversarial to the point where it resists improvement.
If we reached some energy utopia where electricity could fulfill 100% of all non-crypto uses on the planet at no meaningful cost, bitcoin would have to use so much energy that electricity still couldn't be free, or else it could be attacked with the free electricity. I cannot think of any other use of electricity that has this adversarial property.
You need more than just access to electricity to mine. You need the hardware, somewhere to run and maintain it, as well as the whole supply chain leading back to chip fabrication. These are all limited. You'd need a multi hundred-billion dollar covert operation to do all of that and it would take years to build.
The operation wouldn't need to happen covertly, just as bitcoin's increases in electricity usage so far haven't happened covertly.
Bitcoin will, in order to secure the assets on the chain, need to have an adversarial amount of resources wasted. That's the point of proof of work, to prove that you wasted a lot of energy. It's an energy wasting contest.
There are physical limits which mean the waste in this contest-of-waste can only increase so quickly (i.e. manufacturing limits), but I think the fundamentals of the system are as I describe. It is "working as intended" that proof of work must take more energy if energy is cheaper. Practically no other systems work this way.
Let's take the example of video games: bitcoin uses about 150TWh of electricity. From EIA.gov's stats, it looks like residential computer usage is estimated at 36 TWh across the usa (2.4% of residential usage, 1.5T kWh residential [0]). Let's assume all residential computer usage is video games, so it's using a nice 1/4th bitcoin.
So, what's different about these uses? Well, let's say that we manage to make electricity 5 times cheaper by, say, building a fusion reactor or a ton of solar panels. In that scenario, those computers playing video games still use the same amount of electricity, and their power bill goes down. Not a problem for computers/games.
However, if the price of electricity goes down, that's actually a problem for bitcoin. Bitcoin is using 150TWh of electricity, which sorta means to perform a 51% attack, you need 75TWh of electricity (I know, it's more complicated than that). Now that electricity is 5 times cheaper, cool, someone can attack bitcoin for 5 times cheaper right? Well, we can't have that, so bitcoin now has to use 750TWh to have the same security it had before.
The same thing happens for improvements to ASICs or any other improvements pretty much. If bitcoin is cheaper to mine, that just means more mining happens and the cost of mining stabilizes back out.
On the other hand, if a game can be optimized to take less electricity, or use fewer servers, of course that'll happen. Like in almost any venture, accomplishing the same work for cheaper is good when it comes to video games.
That is the difference I see. Crypto isn't just wasteful, it's adversarial to the point where it resists improvement.
If we reached some energy utopia where electricity could fulfill 100% of all non-crypto uses on the planet at no meaningful cost, bitcoin would have to use so much energy that electricity still couldn't be free, or else it could be attacked with the free electricity. I cannot think of any other use of electricity that has this adversarial property.
[0]: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect...