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.