[walden42]

How is that even a fair comparison? Mining isn't just "creating" new bitcoins, it's verifying the transactions of the whole network. To make a somewhat fair comparison we'd have to include the electrical costs of all the physical banks and bank networking systems in the US, which is much, much more expensive. Even that's not a fair comparison, either, since bitcoin is a global currency, but let's not go there.

[dllthomas]

It's true that it's not a fair comparison. The corresponding fair comparison is interesting, though. The thing I worry about is long term. As technology gets better, running banks should become more energy efficient. Because bitcoin mining is inherently competitive, it can't become more efficient in aggregate - if it's cheaper per hash, people will generate more hashes (and/or the difficulty will rise).