I've seen coiners make this argument before. It's basically "doing something incredibly wasteful with X incentivizes the production of X!". Makes zero sense when there are far more useful things could be done with X.
But these days the Elephant in the Room for Bitcoin's energy consumption is Ether's switch from PoW to PoS. Here's Digiconomists own data on what that did for Ether's energy consumption:
Assuming the PoW to PoS transition can be considered "successful" (AFAIK it has been), any crypto-fan who's actually a seriously a believer in the technological superiority of this stuff (not me, obviously) would surely have to concede that Ether has made a huge technological leap forward in efficiency while Bitcoin has been left behind in the crypto stone age. The fact folks are apparently happy to continue to pour 100-200TWh a year into Bitcoin when Ether could do the same job with a fraction of the energy cost is... telling.
Not looked into it in more detail but I've also seen claims the switch to PoS should accelerate Ether's transactions per second from 10-20 - similar to PoW Bitcoin - to 100,000-200,000 per second. Again, that makes Bitcoin look utterly obsolete.
So Bitcoin is technologically left behind... and yet there it is, still. Whatever's going on, it doesn't appear very rational. I'd suggest "rigged" is actually the more appropriate word.
Interesting read at
https://www.technologyre...stake-why-cant-bitcoin/
on the slim prospects of Bitcoin moving to PoS.