[jcranmer]

> It is huge, I agree. But ridiculous in comparison to what? How much energy/CO2 does the traditional financial system consume/produce (incl. buildings, production, transport, security)?

I've done the math before, but I've forgotten the precise results I came up with. The results are in the realm of "Bitcoin uses more energy than that which is used to produce all the US [maybe all the world's] currency." Like, it's not even close--I think shipping gold bars on an airplane may be more energy-efficient than Bitcoin now.

[frankenst1]

Impressive, I wouldn't know where to begin. Could you expand on which items you included and how you decided on how they were weighted?

[jcranmer]

The hardest part is finding the raw data. I only considered the energy costs of actually producing the currency itself (mostly imputed by operations cost, since I couldn't find any reports on the actual energy consumption of the mints or engraving presses). I realize purists will object to not including the amortized cost of the facility, etc., but the number that's being compared against for Bitcoin focuses only on the cost of the proof-of-work and not the similar facility costs.