Say you want to transfer a billion dollars 3000 miles. A billion dollars is 10 million Benjamins, which weighs 10 tons. You're not fitting that in a Tesla. More likely, you'll put it in an armored car and hire a few armed guards to go along with it. If you need to transport it overseas, you need a freighter (and a week) too. Now the energy cost of that Bitcoin transaction doesn't seem so bad.
The institutional interest in Bitcoin I've seen lately seems to assume a thesis of dollar depreciation and Bitcoin usurping its role as the global reserve currency. Ordinary people are not going to transact in Bitcoin under this thesis: they'll use dollars, pounds, deutchmarks, lira, yuan, etc. for their ordinary domestic transactions. Only banks, importers, and other major financial institutions need to convert the local currency into Bitcoin and settle up on the international markets, and these transactions will be in the tens-of-billions. Most of Bitcoin's drawbacks go away with this use-case - it doesn't matter that the network is limited to 4 TPS when only ~hundreds of transactions are conducted daily, and the energy use per transaction is similarly minimized. Bitcoin's advantages in trustlessness and lack of a central authority are hugely important in international relations, where nobody trusts anybody else and there's no higher authority to appeal to.
(Stellar's even better for this use-case, and has had a similar recent run-up, but currencies have strong network effects and it's unlikely that Stellar could get the name recognition or trust that Bitcoin has gotten.)
The institutional interest in Bitcoin I've seen lately seems to assume a thesis of dollar depreciation and Bitcoin usurping its role as the global reserve currency. Ordinary people are not going to transact in Bitcoin under this thesis: they'll use dollars, pounds, deutchmarks, lira, yuan, etc. for their ordinary domestic transactions. Only banks, importers, and other major financial institutions need to convert the local currency into Bitcoin and settle up on the international markets, and these transactions will be in the tens-of-billions. Most of Bitcoin's drawbacks go away with this use-case - it doesn't matter that the network is limited to 4 TPS when only ~hundreds of transactions are conducted daily, and the energy use per transaction is similarly minimized. Bitcoin's advantages in trustlessness and lack of a central authority are hugely important in international relations, where nobody trusts anybody else and there's no higher authority to appeal to.
(Stellar's even better for this use-case, and has had a similar recent run-up, but currencies have strong network effects and it's unlikely that Stellar could get the name recognition or trust that Bitcoin has gotten.)