[nradov]

Can you quantify the energy wasted on HDCP? My understanding is that it's typically handled by efficient custom circuits.

[undersuit]

Efficient? Maybe, you can still have inefficient hardware. The hardware dedicated to HDCP encryption is single purpose, just like a Bitcoin miner. I'd expect the Bitcoin hardware is far more tuned for efficiency than most hardware HDCP circuits since power usage is the major cost of owning a miner in the longterm.

I'm not aware of any actual metrics and like I originally said I'm pretty sure bitcoin mining still uses more energy.