NANO uses around 0.112 Wh. Barely any energy at all. At its peak, NANO might consume about as much as energy as a single shopping mall.
XMR is about 60 Gwh. Such is the price of truly anonymous electronic payments, at least until more cryptographers work on XMR to figure out how we can increase efficiency.
Energy consumption is an issue, but it’s overblown. There are trivial things that have a far greater climate impact than crypto, but provide less potential value to humanity. If people spent half as much time worrying about the climate impact of their own choices, our crisis would be all but solved. Finger-pointing is easy, changing yourself is hard.
Still, most cryptos are rapidly moving to reducing their energy consumption by a factor of 100-1000 by moving to proof of stake.
> I could write an ACID-compliant DB that could do 1M TPS
Your system is neither distributed nor trustless. Users will be at your mercy. Hardly the ideal system for humanity.
Try designing a similar system that works across hundreds of thousands of disparate nodes, many of which may be malicious or differently configured and in poor network environments. You will very quickly arrive at a similar model to modern cryptocurrencies.
> At what point do we cut our losses and say this approach isn't working
Certainly not when development speed has been rapidly increasing over time?
These are early stage projects. A few years for a volunteer-designed global electronic financial system that frees humanity from the mercy of banks and financial censorship is not bad.
Especially when you can’t take an Agile “move fast and break things” approach.
> But we move at a faster pace than the Romans now and if a technology hasn't matured after 11 years
Why do you keep saying the technology hasn’t matured after 11 years? I feel like you barely read my reply - how are NANO, XMR, and ETH/ETH2 not massive indicators of the improvement in the crypto sphere? Each alone represents a significant generational stride beyond BTC as it was originally defined. NANO brought us fast transactions, XMR brought us anonymity and censorship resistance, and ETH brought us smart contracts.