[arebop]

It gets pretty thorny because you have to be careful about what aspects of traditional platforms correspond to the problems addressed by bitcoins. Some folks will try to compare the electricity usage of Visa to that of Bitcoin for example, even though Bitcoin doesn't provide low-latency payments and Visa doesn't provide distributed consensus.

Another easy thing to measure about Bitcoin is its economic value. You can readily assess the market capitalization, and you can also examine the blockchain to see precisely how much it cost users to conduct the transactions in recent blocks. The bottom line for me is that the miners aren't working for charity; they are taking fees+reward >= their electricity cost, and this is paid for by the users of Bitcoin. So those who criticize Bitcoin as an environmental catastrophe might as well say the same thing about YouTube, Aluminum production, or modern industry more generally.

It's just a particularly easy target because many people find the economic importance of Bitcoin and the recent development of the same mystifying.