The assertion that I'm too uneducated to have an opinion is getting pretty old, and it comes off like you're just unwilling to engage with the argument at its face. I'll try one last time to present it as susinctly as possible -- it's really a fairly simple and rational argument.

My position isn't based on any mistake. It's based on the fact that the vast majority of crypto is POW. The environmental impact point doesn't claim anything about the resource use of other institutions like your strawman suggests, just that POW (and thus practically crypto at large) encourages unnecessary computation on a massive scale. The existence of POS proves it's unnecessary, but you can also see it by the observation that the results of the computations have no meaning other than a prof that computation was performed. Moreover, the vast majority of value that crypto provides is in the form of speculative investing (which imo is not meritable), and so those transactions do not benefit from the security that the computation supposedly provides (since profits are just converted back to fiat anyway), and so the majority of resource use is not only wasteful but also unjustified. I'm not saying that the theory of crypto has no merit, but its current form in the real world is so far off from the idealized promise of decentralized and perfectly secure transactions that it's actually doing far more harm than good.