[nephanth]

Yes? If the energy could be used for something productive, but is instead used for something unproductive, then it is a waste

While that energy technically serves the purpose of letting a monetary system function, traditional monetary infrastructure requires vastly smaller amounts of energy, thus this is a wasteful use of it

[Jach]

Last time I did some numbers, bank of america spent around $1bn per year in cybersecurity alone, and bitcoin mining energy cost about 10x that. For ensuring the security of a trustless worldwide monetary system, it's not that bad in comparison.

[misnome]

… unless your trustless worldwide monetary system wants to process more than seven transactions per second.

I guess BoA probably handles a little more than that?

[fidelramos]

The energy expense of Bitcoin is dominated by its Proof-of-Work algorithm, the cost of processing transactions is negligible compared to that. And the PoW operates over the root of the last block's Merkle tree, which is a hash of all the transactions in the block. Being a fixed-size hash it doesn't matter if the block contains 1,000, 1 million or 1 billion transactions.

Therefore Bitcoin could scale to handle millions of transactions per second with a sublinear increase in electricity spent. [0]

[0] http://blog.vermorel.com/journal/2017/12/17/terabyte-blocks-...