[koolba]

But as a lot of it happens in China, it's more likely to be powered by coal right?

[kobeya]

No, a lot of it happens in Sichuan province specifically, because of the availability of hydroelectric power. Also Washington state for the same reason.

[johnnydoebk]

But considering the fact that the computations are useless, the energy is still wasted.

[jcoffland]

The computations are not useless. They enable a decentralized currency which is a very valuable thing.

[mike-cardwell]

Why did you say "wasted" instead of "used" ? We put energy in, we get value out.

[kobeya]

Existing trust-based financial infrastructure is extremely wasteful too.

[Artemis2]

If I'm correct, 1718MW over a year is over 15TWh, which if Bitcoin were a country would place it 78th in this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...

I don't think Visa uses up as much energy as a small country for processing 7 transactions per second at full speed.

[kyboren]

Using that list, Cuba and North Korea immediately follow Bitcoin in energy consumption. Cuba or North Korea alone could never hope to gain control of the network: they could not supply enough power even if they redirected everything to malicious Bitcoin mining rigs. More realistically, even a country like Saudi Arabia (with a reported 272TWh) could not control the Bitcoin network in the long term--"wasting" 5.5% of your national energy consumption is not sustainable.

This "waste" is actually a kind of security all its own.

[kobeya]

I was referring to the entire finance and insurance industries which represent 7.2% of US GDP.

[eru]

Comparing finance's shares of GDP to bitcoin hashing power is useless. The power used for hashing is at best a lower bound on how much a bitcoin based finance system would need to run.

(Eg even with bitcoins, you'd still have essentially the same stock market. You might be trading coloured coins on the blockchain, but people would still need to work to raise capital etc.)