Ok so let me get this straight. Large energy-burning supercomputers being used to get bitcoin is different from large swaths of land being dug up for coal to get dollars, deforestation to make paper to get dollars, and the whole oil industry needed to support everyone's grind to get dollars is different. That's cool.
Dollars are not made of coal, Most dollars are not even made of paper, and these that are, are not made of wood paper.
I don't know how much US spends on replacing worn out bills but it's not much. I do think that everyone should switch to plastic banknotes. They last much longer. I doubt one banknote costs more than couple of cents.
whereas mining one bitcoin costs about one bitcoin in dollars.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12771.htm
6 cents for $1 bill
and 14 cents for $100
That's what it costs to make a dollar. But what does it cost for "a dollar" to live it's life? What is the material cost, entirely, of transmitting one dollar once? What is the material cost of transmitting one dollar worth of a Proof of Stake coin quantity equivalent to a dollar?
What is the food cost of carrying dollars and adding their weight to my person?
What is the gasoline cost?
What cost for this one physical dollar accounts to armored car services, rifle rounds? How much is the cost of the hands being paid to usher this dollar to me, in both their own personal time, and their food costs for doing it, and for getting there to do it divided by the number of dollars to change hands? What is the cost of building the banks over the number of dollars that they transact? And of tellers, and of credit reporting agencies?
How much actual hidden infrastructure are you ignoring because you just want to stare at the tip of a dollar shaped iceberg?
There's a massive amount of our world eaten by cash infrastructure. Sure, Bitcoin has a bunch of nameless faceless servers generating heat... And cash has a bunch of people burning heat all slaving over the exchange of dollars. That one dollar to live just a single transaction is going to be some percentage of a dollar. There's a number that can be attached as the "average transactional cost".
For both fiat cash currencies and Proof of Work cryptocurrencies, that number is high. For Proof of Stake currencies that number is lower than the lowest average transactional cost associated with the cheapest form of electronic credit transaction: I push a button, a small signal goes out, and then it's finalized onto the ledger, and because there is no such busywork in Stake based crypto it just gets filed with all the other transactions without hassle or work. No metal boxes, no trucks, no physical wallets, no dollars in pockets, no mining or minting metal into coins, no credit reporting bureaus, no ACH, no balance confirmations. Merely everyone who needs to know I spent money at gets a notification that money got spent into their pockets.
