The only reason bitcoin is an energy waste is because of the development and publicity situation. There are numerous solutions to making cryptocurrency energy-linear and appropriately anonymous, but these are all used by altchains rather than bitcoin core. It's notable that people might trust bitcoin more if balances were not immediately available on a block explorer. Of course those balances can be quite wrong because a wallet is made of many private keys. With some effective and supportive human work among or near the core team, the problems would resolve quickly. Meanwhile many support bitcoin because we need popular control and transparent cryptographic reliability in the global economy. It makes us money to have math in competition with politics, and verifies integrity of our records and messages. I hope. I've been shifting towards ethereum a little again. There's a Wrapped BTC token for trading bitcoin on ethereum dexs. I haven't looked at the contracts to verify reliability at all, though. Ideally it would get block and tx hashes stored cross-chain, dunno whether it does. Learn and practice smart contracts.