| Here's another perspective about future. Bitcoin energy consumption comes from mining. Miners will work only if they are profitable. It means, that they should get more income in $, than they spend for electricity. That might not be true for some periods of time, but generally this is true. Miners get block reward + transaction fees. Block rewards are halving every few years. Transaction fees are harder to estimate, but I don't think that they'll rise significantly. Last mined block rewarded miner with 6.25 BTC + 0.83 BTC. I think that it's reasonable to expect that rewards per block will be limited to some number, say 50 BTC. So miner gets <=50 BTC for his efforts. He exchanges those BTC to USD (or Yuan or whatever) and pays for electricity. Block is mined every 10 minutes in the entire world. When I'm talking about miner, I'm talking about all miners combined. So basically his energy spendings are limited by 50 BTC * BTC rate. Last block had 7 BTC reward, with 45650 USD/BTC rate it means that global miner community can afford $300k every 10 minutes to spend for electricity. Of course I'm not calculating hardware costs, salaries, margins, so in reality it's even less. What I'm trying to convey is that global bitcoin electricity consumption is limited by something like 50 * BTC price per 10 minutes. And BTC exchange rate is not limitless. So even if bitcoin electricity consumption is huge, it won't consume all our Earth resources. I'll be a tiny chunk of our energy consumption. There's 190,040 tons of mined gold in the world. 1 ton is 60 million USD, so there's $11 trillion worth of gold in the world. There could only be 21 million of bitcoins. That makes $543 000 as a higher estimate for possible bitcoin price if it would replace gold (and I don't really see it happening). |