I think the difference is that bitcoin mining is an intentional race about who can spend the most energy.
You can argue about how useful it is to move gold, but at least it's a physical process that requires a well-defined amount of energy - and can be optimised if you want to spend less.
With bitcoin, there is no set amount of power that is needed to mine a block. The answer is literally "as much power as possible".
IIUC your point is that energy is wasted in the mining process. But I am not sure you can say it is a competition for who spend the most energy... Is power consumption linear with computing power, I am curious. Anyways, just as gold moving, computing power can be optimised for energy efficiency.
Also it would have been better for OP to compare not with gold moving but with gold ... mining, an extremely energy hungry ans environmentally destructive industry.
In bitcoins case the incentives are such that it’s power consumption that’s essentially being measured.
Now let’s say that someone would make a chip that would use only 10% of the power of the current ones. What do you think would happen: People would keep current hashrates and just consume 10% of energy.
Or:
People would scramble to get these chips and keep on burning the same amount. As your rewards are basically due to your ratio of the total hashrate. Not any absolute amount.
It's actually like that with gold also: the amount it costs to mine/refine an ounce of gold is always almost the same as the value of an ounce of gold, because whether or not it is worth exploiting a marginal deposit depends on the value of gold.
You can argue about how useful it is to move gold, but at least it's a physical process that requires a well-defined amount of energy - and can be optimised if you want to spend less.
With bitcoin, there is no set amount of power that is needed to mine a block. The answer is literally "as much power as possible".