What are benefits of bitcoin? It certainly was an interesting idea but afaik tell it completely failed except as a target for betting.

Globally decentralized publicly accessible trustless yet trustable digital money sounds like a good thing to me.

With the emphasis on "current" one tends to agree. But I tend to think of it (the energy consumption) as a necessary feature for an unbreakable infrastructure of trust. In the future, it could even turn out to be the socially single most important form of energy consumption.