More like false equivalence. What makes the cryptocurrency carbon footprint particularly wasteful is that, if we're being honest, its primary use is currency speculation.
Primary use today, sure. But cryptocurrency has more practical application every year, and there are a lot of compelling reasons to believe that major economic players will switch to decentralized currency (not private blockchains, the public ones) in the next 10-20 years.
If during the dotcom bubble internet startups had required something similar (provable waste), people would have said the same thing you are. But here we see that the internet clearly was a trillion dollar industry, just that most dotcom startups were too early and poorly managed speculative vehicles.
Decentralized cryptocurrency will be a trillion dollar industry, and that's trillions in annual recurring revenue I'm talking about, not trillions in total market cap. It's just today we've seen the speculation get ahead of the technology.
