Those are fair questions. You say it’s a waste of electricity, but compared to what? This is a de-centralized store of value. There’s never been anything like this outside of precious metals. Additionally, most of the cost is in mining the initial 21 million coins.

It’s not “funny money”. It’s secured cryptographically. You trust crypto enough to do payments over the internet right? This is not different.

There are various methods of recovery, but yes, in the end, if you lose certain details, you lose the money. That’s how you get the security though. If anybody could recover your funds without your key, it wouldn’t be very secure, would it?

If you are very concerned about it, you could keep the details on a piece of paper locked in a safe. It would be quite secure, and easier to transport than gold.

China is indeed a concern, but miners have an incentive to be honest. If they tried to cheat, the value of all their bitcoin would go to zero.

Bitcoin is not the end all. We’ll see how it evolves, but cryptocurrency is the future in any case.