If the goal is to educate the public on the scale of power involved, a comparison with a commonly used service would help a lot IMHO.
Something like 'Bitcoin consumes 14 times the energy of Google and half (according rough estimates) that of Youtube' would make things easier to grasp before hitting the reader with country comparisons.
FWIW here is my list of 'if a service were a country':
I think the average person would find it easier to imagine the consumption of a country than that of a an internet service.
Both are basically unintelligible, but at least the country one is something that one can _imagine_ from their experience, if wrongly (my house consumption:country consumption = 1:population).
I bet few people on hackernews itself have any clue what the energy consumption of google might be, and have no way of relating to it.
That is correct, but not a fair comparison, imho. Google, as a centralized entity, is one of a few companies devoted to go 100% green. Bitcoin consuming that much energy is akin to saying that production of wine all over the world is 14x what's being produced in France. Where's the logic?
Both are basically unintelligible, but at least the country one is something that one can _imagine_ from their experience, if wrongly (my house consumption:country consumption = 1:population).
I bet few people on hackernews itself have any clue what the energy consumption of google might be, and have no way of relating to it.