[sgornick]

Quite a bit of the money that mining operators receive is now going mostly going towards investment in R&D (and soon, manufacture) of ultra-efficient ASIC based mining hardware.

This things solve the computational work at a couple orders of magnitude greater than GPUs (the currently prevalent mining hardware) does.

So instead of 70% of the cost of mining going to pay for the electricity, it will be 10%, and the cost of the technology consuming the remaining 90%. I.e., in terms of total kWhs consumed for Bitcoin mining, we probably are already past the peak.

One single bank building in Manhattan consumes way more power than Bitcoin ever has.