No one has complained that gold mining wasted too much energy, since that is a must. You must overcome certain natural energy barrier to mine gold, there is no other way.This energy requirement is fixed regardless of gold's price
Nope,
when actual physical mining operational costs does not match the current price,
miners temporary close the mines which stops all energy used to mine new gold.
They just cease paying for people and resources to mine the gold, they still own the gold mine,
once the price of gold returns mining into profitability they start mining again.
This also does not stop current gold owners from trading gold.
Contrast this with bitcoin flawed design, if the BTC miners take a month pause due to not being profitable the whole network stops.
No bitcoins can be traded with anyone.
Gold does not have that critical flaw,
plus it has uses in the real world that always use up excess supply once prices fall, bitcoin does not.
So yes Virginia, Gold is a better store of value than bitcoin could ever pretend to be.
You seems proved my observation: Gold miners stopping their mining or not, does not change the mining difficulty of gold, thus the energy barrier for mining one ounce of gold stays the same regardless what miners do
However for bitcoin, if lots of miners with old rigs stopped their mining due to unprofitable, the difficulty will go down significantly, thus the cost of mining one bitcoin will become much cheaper. It is self-adjusting, depends on how much people join the competetion. True, if not a single person on planet join the competetion, then the price will drop to zero, but I can guarantee you that won't happen, since I have my mining rigs running 24/7/365 heating my basement
