You really managed to cram in a lot of the most common myths into one post.
Isn't there a Warren Buffet quote for just about everything? I could swear there's one about how when you're getting investment advice from your cabbie, that's when it's time to sell, or something along those lines. I feel like cryptocurrencies are basically somewhere in that place now. Everybody knows they're worthless, but so long as money keeps piling into them, even the big companies can be lured into letting people throw their money into the ether and hope for the best. I could picture that the sky is the limit for any crypto but that at the same time, they should be among the hardest hit on the way down once the world gets into the next recession or we see countries just outlawing them entirely.
Bitcoin is one of the first things that a commoner has been able to put money into before bigger money has been able to. So the fact that a "cabbie" might be talking about bitcoin I don't think is a sign of a top for it at all. If anything, Buffett's quote is a sign of how unfair access is to investing in the traditional market. Why should it be a sign of the top if a "cabbie" is talking about investing? Shouldn't it be something that everyone has access to? Only the rich have access to IPOs, VC funding rounds, the best mutual funds, etc. Buffett's quote is, in reality, a sign of his rich ass privilege. Bitcoin is available to anyone and everyone.
That second part I know we've already seen some discussion about. There's honestly no legitimate reason for Bitcoin in specific to exist. From what I've read, it can't be used for small purchases at all the way credit cards can because of the time it takes to go through, the overhead, and the fact that when it comes down to it, it draws something like 10 million times as much electricity for a $10 purchase as standard credit card networks use when aggregating their power usage and the billions of small (and large) purchases made every year.
Bitcoin can be used for small payments. I use it for all my online purchasing over the lightning network. I regularly use it to pay invoices that are only a couple hundred satoshis in size (a few cents) with no fees and instant settlement. Bitcoin's energy usage should not be calculated on a per transaction basis because its energy usage is not scaled or dependent to how many transactions are processed. Bitcoin's energy usage is simply to secure the network.
There are several factors that impact how much energy it will use. The price is one of the only upward pressures on its energy usage. There are, however, several downward forces on its energy consumption. The difficulty adjustment, ASIC efficiency and logistics, and the block reward halvings. For example, because the block reward gets halved every 4 years, this causes downward pressure to be applied to how much energy is used, effectively cutting in half mining profits that come from the block subsidy. This means that in a few years, a majority of bitcoin's mining profitability will need to come from transaction fees. What this effectively means is that any energy that bitcoin consumes will be directly spent and paid for as a result of economic activity that takes place on the bitcoin network. A block can contain an infinite amount of value and can settle an infinite amount of transactions (a single bitcoin transaction can be settling millions of transactions itself). Therefore there is no more efficient monetary system in the long run that uses energy as efficiently as bitcoin does without energy being wasted on things like lost productivity, bureaucratic waste, poor governance, lost value, senseless logistics, etc. Saying that bitcoin is a waste of energy misses the bigger picture.
They're unregulated, they're heavily used for organized crime and money laundering with basically 100% of hackers now accepting crypto instead of any other form of payment, in fact with cryptocurrencies effectively inventing modern ransomware attacks because of the ease of getting the money into an unregulated country with ease, and the environmental costs are massive and skyrocketing. The environmental damage that crypto mining does alone should be justification to outlaw it worldwide, as it's on track to cause more CO2 than all personal automobiles in the world in not long at all.
Bitcoin is actually heavily regulated in most parts of the world. Almost all bitcoin exchanges and institutions must follow the same KYC/AML regulations that traditional financial institutions must follow. They're not heavily used for crime and money laundering. Less than 0.5% of cryptocurrency activity was for illicit activity in 2020. Bitcoin only consumes about 0.05% of the world's total energy production. Its carbon footprint stands at about 42.94Mt of CO2e annually. Compare that with worldwide automotive carbon emissions which currently stands at over 2Gt of CO2e while the overall worldwide road transportation emissions is over 4Gt of CO2e annually. It seems like your misrepresenting the carbon footprints of these two sectors by an order of magnitude.
https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-transport