But my concern was about the absurd energy usage. "The future" and "innovation" doesn't stand well with "massively wasteful" or "resource hungry". Neither is taking the attitude of "It’s the only way" standing well with innovation.

Also regarding your first comment—from someone writing on Quora i got the impression that anyone, regardless how many tokens (or fractions of tokens) they got, they can participate in validating proof-of-stake chains by setting up validators, which are much cheaper than mining rigs. Bitcoin's proof-of-work is taken up by massive miners and "big money makes big money" anyway. So if that’s true i don’t see how proof-of-stake benefits the wealthy and how Bitcoin doesn’t.

Not to mention that there is already massive inequality on the Bitcoin platform where there are a lot of addresses holding thousands, tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of BTC (for reference 20,000 BTC is a bit over 1,000,000,000 USD). Multiple ‘hundreds’ addresses could also be held by same people. If they are against wealth inequality the Bitcoin community could adopt a protocol where a small percentage from the biggest addresses and/or from general transaction fees are redistributed towards the smallest addresses. This would also attract the masses to the platform, billions of low income people, and boost adoption. And i don't think wealthy people would be able to game the system much by fractioning their BTC into dozens of different addresses — there's a point past which it would cease to be feasable.