A safe blockchain requires enough power so that no other entity can reproduce what you've done. It solves the Byzantine General's problem so you no longer have to have trust in anyone that the transaction is real.

But it only works if the difficulty level is high enough that a determined competitor can't split the chain at a lower block, reproduce everything you've done with changes, and outrace you to build an even longer chain. In Proof of Work blockchain systems, the chain showing the most work is always true.

By dedicating enough energy, the Bitcoin blockchain becomes immutable, because no other country/group will have the energy to wipe the history of what has already been written.

It comes down to who you trust more. A banker, or the math that underpins the blockchain? It may take less energy to trust a banker, but I'll trust math any day of the week.

No matter what you think of currency and the economy, Bitcoin is needed because there simply is no other mechanism available to man that carries this level of certainty. If we give up on it, and don't build a few nuclear reactors to keep up the difficulty level, we're back to trusting in our overlords again.

It evidently takes quite a bit of electrical power to run the computers if you want to mine Bitcoin on an industrial scale. Basically you are verifying a transaction between two entities for the Bitcoin people and you get paid in Bitcoin.

One characteristic of money is that real money is a byproduct of energy expended as in physical mining of metals. Bitcoin has almost all the same characteristics as gold and silver. I believe more in metals than electrons but if it's made a medium of exchange and limited in its numbers. Any value increas can expand its availability through fractionalization rather than making more of it controlling inflation. It can be naturally contracted the same way. In fact I'm of the opinion MAGA will be a fraud without the death of the fed.