If you want a sound currency you will have to pay of its infrastructure and security. Will you trust banks and central banks to do that? Corrupt institutions can print the money they want, tax us indirectly via inflation, devaluation, currency debasement. And we've seen fraud after fraud ripping the value of fiat money. The question is: do you want decentralized and totally secure money or not? If yes, then you will sure understand the purpose of spending energy on bitcoin. Oh and for the ones who say it's a speculation tool, i don't even bother to present examples of all the speculation present and past that fiat money has enabled and the ruin that it brought to millions of speculators. If i own a bitcoin i know for sure that nobody can dupllicate, triplicate, etc... the value of it. Nobody can print a duplicate of a bitcoin. Outside the blockchain, nobody can issue bitcoin out of nothing, namely through fractional reserve and debt. For all of this i will gladly pay a fair value for the energy it takes to mantain bitcoin.

As far as i'm concerned, i seldom buy pop/rock CD's because of the quality of the sound. I don't know it this is the reason why people in general are abandoning CD's, but it's my own reason. As some ppl here said, CD's are being badly masterized resulting in hyper-compressed, clipped music with no dynamic range whatsoever. The great advantage of the CD medium is it's enormous dynamic range (90db,) compared to other mainstream mediums like the vinyl, but instead of taking advantage of this, sound engineers follow the trend and prefer to push things all way up. Well it happens that they can't do this compreesion mess in vinyl because the needle would jump off tracks, so, in many cases, we end up having much better quality sound on vinyl. When i really like an album but i hate the way it sounds, i'll end up buying the vinyl version. If there's no vinyl available i'll put in in a list for a future buy, when this loudness war will be over and i will have the chance to get a proper remastered CD version. Red Hot Chilli Peppers are a good example of this: they asked another sound engineer to remaster Stadium Arcadium in vinyl (unfortunately not on CD) and surely anyone can tell the diference from the bad, loud, and clipped sound (CD) and the a very well crafed masterization in the vinyl version. For a better explanation about this subject i recommend everyone to watch this video. And talking about mp3, as CD's are kept to maximum average loudness we can less ear the subtilities of each instrument so there's no point in talking about quality and there isn't a great difference between a CD and a MP3. We are using very few of the extent capabilities of the CD medium with actual pop/rock rules of "hot" masterizing.