[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.)

[kobeya]

The hashing power creates trust in settlement. Much of the financial industry is also about trusted settlement through other means. They are in fact quite comparable in that sense.

[eru]

You are right that the hashing power basically produces trust in settlement.

I guess where we disagree is in how much of a proportion effort in finance is spent on producing that kind of trust vs other activities (like eg capital allocation, or hunting for arbitrage activities etc).