Perhaps you are unaccustomed to people disagreeing with you?  Nothing I said was intended to be aggressive or angry.  Perhaps slightly exasperated, but I've been answering similar questions here for a decade now, so I'm not really bothered by it at all. It's just the same old same old all over again.

There is no need to change Bitcoin away from POW. There are MANY other crypto currencies that use something other than POW, and they've been around for years.  If any of them had implemented a significantly better solution, then it would be the leading cryptocurrency of the world.

Beyond that, the only way to make a change to the consensus mechanism would be a hard-fork.  A hard fork would require overwhelming support from ALL users (consumes, merchants, miners, HODLers, exchanges, etc).  As you can see from the response you've gotten on this discussion board, getting that overwhelming support is going to be effectively impossible.  Especially the miners.  If at least on miner and one user in the ENTIRE world refuse to switch away from POW, then there will still be a Bitcoin in the world that is using POW.  In that case, the new (non-POW) Bitcoin would effectively be an alt-coin, and as I've already pointed out, alt-coins without POW already exist.  Furthermore, how are you going to convince an overwhelming majority of miners, that are making profit from their rigs, that they should just turn those rigs off and let the new (non-POW) Bitcoin take their place?


Someone on the internet makes an outrageous claim (and one that common sense indicates is nonsense) and the world needs to provide proof that the outrageous claim is false?  Here's a better idea.  Perhaps SOMEONE (anyone?) making the claim that Bitcoin's energy usage is a significant problem can provide the proof that it's actually a problem? Think about EVERYTHIING that goes into maintaining just the U.S. dollar as a trusted medium of exchange (skipping all the other Fiat currencies in the world).  Think about the minting of the physical currency, the securing and transporting of that physical currency, the secret service effort to prevent counterfeiting and fraud, the banking system, vaults, branches, ATMs, tellers, all the fuel spent on all the vehicles by all the employees getting to and from work, all the databases and computers for storing balances all over the world, the networks needed for inter-bank transfers, the consumer level electronic payment systems, card readers, routers, security systems, etc. I'm sure there's more I haven't thought to type just now. Some people might even include much of the U.S. military in calculations on what the U.S. spends to make sure that their currency keeps its status as the reserve currency of the world. Stop and think for just a few minutes about the total amount of energy that the world spends on this one Fiat monetary system.  Do you really believe that the Bitcoin miners in the world are spending more than the entire world is spending on the U.S. dollar system?  If you want to make that claim, then I'd like to see some proof. Otherwise, I'm always going to dismiss that concept with as little thought as I dismiss the flat-earthers and the moon-landing deniers.