[paulgb]

> The electricity of the worlds ATM,s bank branches, trading floors, etc dwarfs the electricity cost of bitcoin.

Even if Bitcoin actually became a valid means of transaction and bank branches, ATMs, etc became obsolete, it doesn’t replace the need for trading floors as an interface between finance and equities/commodities, so that’s a weird comparison.

But even so, I wouldn’t be so confident that the banking sector uses more, or will for long given the current investment spree into mining. Here’s one plant that will use nearly 4x the energy of downtown Dallas:

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/31/bitcoin-mining-giants-bitdee...

Mind you, the more the price of Bitcoin goes up, the more energy miners burn on mining, so if Bitcoin actually grew to the size of the fiat economy we’d be talking about substantially more energy use.

[bradwood]

> Mind you, the more the price of Bitcoin goes up, the more energy miners burn on mining, so if Bitcoin actually grew to the size of the fiat economy we’d be talking about substantially more energy use.

You are not taking into account the diminishing block reward. More and more miners are chasing a dwindling supply of coin and will eventually only earn transaction fees and no block reward. This will put a natural dampener on more miners coming in (all other things being equal) and it will plateau.

[paulgb]

Right, the energy use goes up with the value and (separately) down over time. They’re separate variables, but it’s fair to point out that they're not independent variables (the price is more likely to vary over a longer time horizon), which is I think the point you’re making?