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How do you explain a Grandpa why BTC consume so much energy?

Bitcoiner1

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How do you explain a Grandpa why BTC consume so much energy?
607 sats \ 32 comments \ @Bitcoiner1  19h bitcoin_beginners
Just asking for some tips.
I've a relative who doesn't understand anything about BTC and he is stock with the same old argument about all the electricity is needed for mining BTC.
What would be your approach on this situation?
Do you have an article (non technical) about this topic?
Cheers
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fractions of a penny for your thoughts?
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41 sats \ 1 reply \ @BTCMiner  15h
Proof-of-work (PoW) mining is what permits bitcoin to be resistant against centralized control.
Mining exists to cement the ordering of transactions.
That's it.  That's the entire reason that Bitcoin mining exists.
That means neither any government, nor any mining pools or mining cartels with less than 50% of the hashrate have the ability to change the ordering of the transactions.
In over a dozen years, there has never been a transaction ordering issue outside of a single incident in 2013 when a new release of the software changed the behavior and a chain split occurred (and one person used that opportunity to change the ordering of his transaction such that an exchange got cheated on a confirmed (six confirmations) deposit transaction that no longer existed when the chain split got resolved (i.e., the ordering of the transactions was changed).
While there are shitcoins with PoW mining as well, those are not as resistant, or are unresistant -- due to them requiring a significantly smaller set of resources in order to pull off the double spend attack.   Even a determined attacker (e.g., the U.S. gov't) would not be able to pull off a mining attack against bitcoin (at least, not one that would be a surprise when it was executed).
As far as an article on it ... the following explains the double spend problem.   But it mentions "mining" exactly zero times: