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This implies that the energy required to store wealth in centralized databases is easily calculable.

It also implies that the goal of storing wealth is optimizing for low energy usage, which seems less important than security/safety, ease of transfer, taxation, automation, and other factors.

I’m not making an argument for or against PoW. Just want to point out it’s possible >.6% of humans energy output may in fact go towards banking and payments.

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This is a poorly reasoned comparison. The .6% figure was in reference to .5% of wealth; presumably much more energy would be required to store closer to 100% of wealth with crypto.

Given that we are nearing the irreversible destruction of our climate and that existing electronic systems offer all the benefits you mention, but with massively lower energy cost, your claim that energy “seems less important” is unsupported.

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