IIUC your point is that energy is wasted in the mining process. But I am not sure you can say it is a competition for who spend the most energy... Is power consumption linear with computing power, I am curious. Anyways, just as gold moving, computing power can be optimised for energy efficiency.
Also it would have been better for OP to compare not with gold moving but with gold ... mining, an extremely energy hungry ans environmentally destructive industry.
In bitcoins case the incentives are such that it’s power consumption that’s essentially being measured.
Now let’s say that someone would make a chip that would use only 10% of the power of the current ones. What do you think would happen: People would keep current hashrates and just consume 10% of energy.
Or:
People would scramble to get these chips and keep on burning the same amount. As your rewards are basically due to your ratio of the total hashrate. Not any absolute amount.
