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Crypto isn't the only market using energy, but if it used significantly less energy, the entire world's energy requirements would decrease and we could decommission fossil fuel plants earlier. Every industry should be striving to this but I think crypto is particularly egregious because PoW isn't a requirement for crypto to function (as evidenced by non-PoW coins) and it's massively energy inefficient vs non-PoW. This also doesn't factor in the ewaste element of producing mining hardware like ASICs or GPUs

Governments are cracking down heavily on money laundering all the time. The efforts to do so are increasing all the time. I'm not saying that crypto will be regulated and other currencies won't, just that the oversight on crypto will increase and efforts will be made (as well as efforts in other areas).

I agree that it's similar to a company like Toyota, but Toyota is a more established company operating over a longer period. Newer companies who have recently experienced a boom in business are a higher risk than established businesses and there's no long term history to fall back on.

I'm not saying that regulation would be used purely to crack down on illegal activity and scams, I mean more that regulation would cause crypto to act more like a centralized currency - defeating the purpose of part of the vision for crypto in the first place. It can't be "decentralized" while also being centralized and under significant government regulation like today's "centralized" currencies.

As for your point about Ethereum transactions vs Visa, all ETH transactions include wallet to wallet transactions and extremely large transactions (eg. buying expensive art), which you wouldn't or can't use Visa for. It's obvious that crypto is not yet being used for the vast majority of day to day transactions, the market that Visa and Mastercard occupy. I highly doubt that ETH would get anywhere near the level of bank transfers (probably trillions per day) let alone any other methods of transferring money

I know what NFTs are, and as I've said I don't think they solve an existing problem. Companies want to use it for the marketing and buzzwords, but existing systems can be used in place of an NFT that are better. Games for example have had no trouble handling DLC and microtransactions without NFTs.

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