I do find it interesting that people hate on crypto for its energy consumption but ignore all the other wasteful computation.
What visible ways? Machine generated photographs? About as useful as NFTs...
I can, right now, send liquid assets to any human being on the planet with an internet connection without asking a financial institution, government, bank, payment processor or phone company for permission. That's utility, that's changing the world in a visible way.
I get that financial systems have a purpose, I'd argue there's far more negative utility in them. They have positive effects, but a lot of their utility is not to protect people, but to control them to someone else's benefit. If they protected us without attempting to control us to the benefit of others, or brazenly looting us for our labor, nobody would be trying to build cryptocurrency in the first place.
At the previous 112 TWh/year ETH was using before the merge, that would be the equivalent of 56 billion iPhone SE's. Think about that.
The energy usage of ETH's POW used the equivalent power of 50B smartphones.
As these cryptocurrencies have provided utility to the miners in the past.
My point is, everyone is arguing here thinking only about their own particular self-interest, while pretending to be arguing about some abstract universal good.
And cryptocurrency energy usage is now a low-hanging fruit argument. If we really cared, we would cut much more than just that.
Going back to your argument about all other categories of energy usage, transport using ICE should be feared more, in particular the way huge ships not only pollute the atmosphere but also the oceans.
In fact, I believe you intended to mean only electricity in your comment, but the condescending got the best of you.
Is this your argument?
We should obviously try to cut back on transports of such huge distances, but when necessary, ships are currently the best way even with all the pollution they do. Nonetheless, their current use is still incomparably more effectful on our lives and live quality than cryptos that it can’t be taken at face value.
They were cheaper because all this contamination is called "externalities", which is a code word for "someone else's problem"; and because short term profit is king and responsibilities be damned. Also dumping, tariffs, dominant countries imposing free trade treaties on weaker countries, and so on.
They still have a huge cost. There are of course things that need to be transported these distances, and with or without oil these need to be moved, but also a considerable percent is cheap plastic stuff from China.