[skohan]

It's much, much less efficient if you measure the utility of the banking system vs. the utility of cryptocurrency.

[jeffe]

Okay, so if we're using energy consumption per unit 'utility' as a metric, how much energy should bitcoin consume to be in line with its utility?

[skohan]

Off the top of my head, I could see it as reasonable to pay a 5-10% cost in energy efficiency comparing with traditional transaction systems to enable a truly decentralized model. Bitcoin is nowhere near that in terms of cost/transaction.

[imtringued]

I was going to do a very fancy calculation but 136 TWh would be perfectly ok if Bitcoin did at at least 5k transactions per second with a transaction fee of $0.10.