I haven't done the exact math (I'm sure somebody did, though), but I based on some rough estimates I do believe that for widespread use as currency, trust-based systems beat trustless systems significantly in terms of energy efficiency. Partly because scaling factors - trust scales sublinearly with the number of participants (like average path between two arbitrary vertices in an acyclic graph). PoW energy use scales superlinearly. On top of that, energy use in trust-based systems is upkeep - it's a waste that participants have to pay out of their pocket, so everyone has strong incentives to minimize it. Whereas in PoW systems, energy waste is network security, so the incentive is to maximize it.
"Massive court system with a massive law enforcement arm" doesn't exist just for the large financial institution. It's the baseline, arguably the core piece of social infrastructure. Beyond finances, it serves to protect just about any kind of dealing that involves more than two people. It allows society to coordinate. So if you want to count that in, be sure to limit the scope to just the impact on securing financial deals - otherwise, you'll have to include on the crypto side of the ledger the costs these institutions incur so that crypto developers can spend their days developing financial systems, instead of hunting animals for food with rocks while hiding from the local warlord.
Citation needed? I don't believe this is true. And techniques like payment channels allow you to stretch a significant amount of mileage out of a single transaction. The Sia network for example has payment channels that have over a million payments made per on-chain transaction.
That's also the role of prices - they are signals for people to take action, provided the actors are free. Prices as an information signal simply fail to work when entities like the government use coercive force to interfere. Prices also fail if the markets are based on coercion or violence towards others.
That's true - but arguably orthogonal to the topic of fiat vs. crypto. Yes, the government uses coercive force to interfere, but that's very often to counteract various failure cases of the free market. Another thing that makes prices fail is information asymmetry - which, in reality, is a constant of trade.
Crypto or fiat, there will never be a totally unregulated market that works.
In a way, it's like Star Trek TOS epispode "A Taste of Armageddon" - you can't replace war with a simulation (and then voluntary euthanasia). You won't resolve international conflicts through a friendly match of Q3 Arena. It's an unstable situation, because anyone who disagrees with the result can just pick up a club, or a gun, and force their own result - at which point you're back to square one. And so it is with unregulated markets: someone feels cheated, picks up a gun, and you're back to some form of governance.
"Massive court system with a massive law enforcement arm" doesn't exist just for the large financial institution. It's the baseline, arguably the core piece of social infrastructure. Beyond finances, it serves to protect just about any kind of dealing that involves more than two people. It allows society to coordinate. So if you want to count that in, be sure to limit the scope to just the impact on securing financial deals - otherwise, you'll have to include on the crypto side of the ledger the costs these institutions incur so that crypto developers can spend their days developing financial systems, instead of hunting animals for food with rocks while hiding from the local warlord.