Coins with PoW that waste a ton of electricity sure are the future right? Nothing gets investors excited like a coin that requires ever expanding resources in order to secure the network.
Money must be expensive to create. That's what gives it value.
A rock that came from a planet a thousand light years away is more valuable than a child's macaroni art.
A coin that was forged through millions of computers all competing using a network measured in zettahashes (PoW) is more valuable than a coin given out to someone for sitting on a large stack of already minted coins (PoS).
You may not understand money as well as you think. It's not a bug that Bitcoin or Monero is so hard to create - it's a feature.
If you waste all available energy on mining some PoW coin you will end up with zeroes and ones stored somewhere (HDDs or whatever) that are useless because you have no energy to start the show. Or if we go hardcore physics, since everything is energy, you would end up with nothing, literary. Right there you should see a big difference BTC vs anything physical. BTC is immaterial and requires so many things to function in order to be of some use while everything material stands on it's own. Gold and diamonds are pretty much indestructable and you don't have to use any energy or whatever else to maintain their qualities and properties. Hence all cryptocoins suck in a grand scheme of things.
If it is not up to human greed and a need to secure the network (so failed specie we are) one could run the show with average computer.