[oditorium]

First of all, thank you all for the insightful and civilised discussion of my recent post, and than you for pointing out that the number on blockchain.info is off by almost two orders of magnitude. I have updated my post to account for this.

My main argument was actually slightly tangential to this, in that I am arguing that Bitcoin still needs the protection of the state to survive. I have expanded on this topic in my post today http://www.oditorium.com/ou/2013/11/what-does-it-take-to-att...

and back in April I have written a more general post on the various threats to Bitcoin http://www.oditorium.com/ou/2013/04/fifty-ways-to-kill-bitco...

So my central point is: those 50MW (or whatever they will be when the price/hashrate goes up) are simply the costs of maintaining the ledger. As I have noted in the comments to my post, I agree that this is lower than the energy expended handling cash. However, and this is crucial, it is probably about 50MW higher than the cost of maintaining the ledger in a trust-based system that relies on the courts to maintain the integrity of the ledger.

I am all for running an electronic currency, but IMO the hash-rate protection feature of bitcoin is redundant and wasteful.

PS. If anyone reading this know the guys at blockchain.info can you ask them to update their site? It is not helpful if the information on what is arguably the #1 source for bitcoin related data is off by a factor of 50x for the better part of the year now.