For just accessing a simple resource, it does not use a whole lot of power because it only gets activated when the resource is under load and it helps to sort traffic based on effort placed to the POW puzzle. You can choose to place zero effort and be put in the back of the line, but people who choose to put in some small effort will be put in front of you, and people who put in a larger effort will be in front of them until the resource is no longer oversubscribed, and then it will drop back down to zero. That’s how the Tor network handles it and it works incredibly well. It has stopped the denial of service attacks in their tracks. In most cases, it’s hardly ever even active. Just because it is there, deters attacking it.

Proof of work before connections are established. The Tor network implemented this in August of 2023 and it has helped a ton.

That’s an easy answer. It’s because it’s running Windows 11. Install Linux on it and it won’t suck anymore.

To be fair I’m not a huge fan of pure proof of stake because it makes validation more difficult because you have to have code for slashing somebody’s stake if they are malicious or bad and a malicious entity could just buy up a bunch of your tokens and tank them. Admittedly, not a lot of people would do so, but I could totally see a government buying up a bunch of tokens on a network and purposely crashing the network in order to rid themselves of a nuisance and calling it justified. Proof of work makes that much more difficult. Still doable for certain, but much, much more difficult.

My first question to you would be, how much energy does the banking sector use to run bank branches, haul physical money back and forth, bring employees to and from work, etc?

Next, not all blockchains require extreme levels of computation power for proof of work. Take Monero, for example, which deliberately makes ASIC chips impossible to use and is therefore mined only on CPUs, which are extremely common.

I’d say you’re right for 99% of it, but there is 1% that’s genuinely useful.