Sure, lots of server farms power advertising networks and suck our privacy. But many others power services that define the internet for many people. BTC on the other hand has limited practical uses now because of its volatility and transaction cost/latency issues. So it appears to me that the terawatt-hours for server farms serve society but that for BTC seems to only serve those who profit from speculating in bubbles.
We already have evidence that from a technical perspective the bottom-up pragmatic approach that has created the internet works better than the formal ITU approach. In the late 70's when TCP/IP protocols were taking off, the ITU-T and ISO collaborated on a competing set of standards which were known as the OSI model and protocols. The "rough consensus and running code" model that characterized the internet approach proved much more responsive and resilient than the ITU-T/ISO work and this is reflected in the technology used today. We've already gone through the process of the market choosing a preferred technical solution and the ITU-T solution came up short.
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Internet services useful
ITU-T has tried and failed on a technical basis before
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