IIUC your point is that energy is wasted in the mining process. But I am not sure you can say it is a competition for who spend the most energy... Is power consumption linear with computing power, I am curious. Anyways, just as gold moving, computing power can be optimised for energy efficiency. Also it would have been better for OP to compare not with gold moving but with gold ... mining, an extremely energy hungry ans environmentally destructive industry.