[pcbeef]

It's not just proof-of-work though. It's everything. It's maintaining the entire balance sheet since the beginning of the first minted coin by Satoshi himself.

Doing a simple google search shows that counterfeiting costs the USA alone $200bn a year which is 1.2% of annual GDP. Current market cap of bitcoin is $10bn. This means that $100m would be comparative. Maybe someone can give me the numbers on mining hardware and electricity prices.

To be completely accurate, we need to include cost of minting physical dollars etc...maybe someone can do a better analysis on all this but I'm highly skeptical that bitcoin costs more to run than conventional financial systems.

[yetanotherphd]

That is counterfeiting of goods, not money. Maybe edit your comment and I will reply again?

Also the correct figure to compare with the market cap of bitcoin is M1 (approx 2.5 Trillion) not US GDP (approx 16 Trillion)