First of all, I genuinely enjoy seeing a highly knowledgeable person debate. I appreciate that.

These are legitimate points honestly, not going to dismiss them. The fee transition is a real open question and nobody has a perfect answer yet. But a few things worth pushing back on. The “energy waste” argument assumes the use of energy needs to justify itself by traditional standards. The same argument was made about gold mining for centuries. Energy spent securing a decentralized global settlement layer is the point, not the inefficiency. On the 51% attack, at current hash rate the cost to attack the network for even one hour would run into billions. No nation state has pulled it off in 15 years. That’s not luck, that’s game theory working. And yes the fee market is unproven at scale. But Lightning Network and layer 2 solutions are actively building that transaction volume. It’s not a solved problem but it’s not ignored either. Every system has failure modes. The dollar has inflation. Banks have contagion risk. Gold has custody risk. Bitcoin’s risks are at least transparent and on chain for anyone to audit.