You know that's not true, right?

1) The Yemen number is for the whole system. The energy to send one transaction is tiny and much smaller than using the existing remittances system.

2) With a bank, it's not even clear you could send $5 to Yemen as there's a civil war going on. And if you did find a money transfer company willing to do it, it would be very expensive. With Bitcoin, as long as the person in Yemen has a phone and can get online, you can send them any amount, it will cost ~$2, and take minutes to do.

My favorite benefit is paying $10 in transaction fees for five bucks and then having to wait hours for confirmations.

My favourite benefit of Bitcoin is bypassing the hideously inefficient and corrupt Wall Street financial vampiric system that provided the world with the Global Financial Crisis for which it suffered the punishment of being given billions of dollars by the US Government.

Each to their own I guess.

- inviolable property rights - sound money enables accurate investment valuation and less inflation and wealth inequality - low cost, high security, international final settlement - instant payments on lightning network

Once you find out you'll panic about not having enough. The benefits are apparent when analyzed from the perspective of money as a technology that enables strong property rights defended by cryptography. Robert Breedlove does a podcast on the nature of money which great. This video also does a great job of addressing the "waste" by elaborating on "unforgable costliness" : https://youtu.be/b-7dMVcVWgc

All of these "uses energy per transaction" people are being underserved by their news sources on the development of the lightning network, which is like going from a LAN with global broadcast to NATed and routed TCP/IP (Bitcoin is a global broadcast layer and lightning is a transaction bundling / routing layer/network). I mean an entire country has adopted it and we still have folks on hacker news missing the disruption for the trees!