I shudder to think of the electricity wasted otherwise.
I'm quite concerned about scaling too, but apparently
most people aren't.
Can you copy paste what you wrote there here? It seems to be a private forum.
Sure!
I can copy what I wrote, but I can't copy other people's answers, though.
The most compelling argument in defence of the resources spent for the proof-of-work is that the current legacy systems (banks + credit cards + paypals + etc.) are already eating up tons of resources, and likely mining bitcoins is going to eat much less than that.
While this appears to be fine, I've just noticed it doesn't really work: the legacy systems scale in a more or less proportional way to the transaction volume, i.e. if transaction volume doesn't increase, they do not need to scale up.
Bitcoin's proof-of-work, instead, will apparently go up indefinitely, because either miners will move to countries where electricity and sysadmins are cheaper, or they will find ways to produce more powerful chips. Problem here isn't only the consumed electricity, but the wasted hardware: old chips will be useless and will become just pollution.
Honestly I can't see how can this not go horribly wrong. We'd better think very hard about this now that we are still in early stage, rather than waiting for it to become a huge problem later.