It burns power for security not throughput. You could drop the power requirements to a single raspi to mine the blocks with 0 change to transactional throughput. Inefficiency is traded for security and decentralization. If that is a viable tradeoff... Idk time will tell. The only way to get the efficiency of something like Visa is to replicate what exists with the current banking/card provider layers where the blockchains preform a similar function as the banking network and throughput is handled by a secondary layer on top.

Turns out this is a really really hard engineering problem to solve and it has been tried so many times before. There's a guy who even mqaintains a book on the subject. http://www.mendosa.com/The%20Pursuit%20of%20Noninvsive%20Glucose,%20Fourth%20Edition.pdf I wish them luck. It's a great challange and it will benefit a lot of people if they manage to pull it off.

Or just overdose them with anesthesia drugs. Not that I'm exactly a fan of the death penalty but as long as they're still doing it surely there must be some viable options.