Interesting video - I wouldn't say the interviewer was very professional, but the interviewee is a typical NFT snake oil salesman type. His argument is "these things could potentially have value if people decide they will" which is true as far as it goes. But he provides no reason as to why they will or should. He just tries to hype people up on the idea that they might get big, so buy now! And I will grant you, something out of this will get big. But most of it won't.
Miners on oil rigs - not a bad thing, but I would imagine a very niche and minor portion of overall mining.
Energy Provider Control on East Coast - one individual, using the type of demand side management that is common practice for large utility customers. I would say this behavior makes this person better than many miners, but still fundamentally bad.
The bottom line is that you are using huge amounts of energy for something that is unnecessary. You can argue the value of crypto in general and I'm willing to listen, but the proof of work method is certainly unnecessary.
I can appreciate that the energy cost of Bitcoin will eventually go down once all the coins are mined. There will probably be some point toward the end where (assuming Bitcoin is still viable by that point) even the large value of a coin will not be enough to justify many people mining. But as the value of the coin goes up and as it becomes harder and harder to get those few available coins - isn't this just going to proportionally increase energy usage? And I do get the point - the reason for proof of work is to make it too costly in terms of electricity to generate a 51% attack so an attacker would get less than they spent. I've also heard people say the value of a bitcoin is basically the value of the electricity used to mine it. I get the concept. And I get that there are people who don't like Proof of Stake because it requires a trusted authority to at least some degree. I get why crypto enthusiasts like proof of work and what advantages it has. I think it's just something that isn't good for our society, when applied at a large scale.
In terms of how much is too much - I'd say when it costs 10-20% more energy than any other currency system, that's when it's too much. Currently, on a per user basis Bitcoin consumes 30x more energy than traditional banks. Total use by banks is higher than Bitcoin, but they serve many more users. 5% of all the world's electricity is used on Bitcoin alone. Put the energy use of cryptocurrency in a +/-10% range of regular banks and I think you'd see the problems go away.
