[tptacek]

Those bank branches burn electricity to keep lights on so that people can work, and to run computers that keep track of the same information you'd need to track in a hypothetical all-Bitcoin economy. Bitcoin burns electricity to solve a math problem of escalating difficulty and cost whose solution has no intrinsic value.

That's overthinking it, though; really, the dig about electricity simply comes from the fact that Bitcoin is essentially a competition between "miners" burning escalating amounts of cycles.

[aliakhtar]

Bitcoin's transaction rate is also 3 transactions per second. That's laughably low for using up the same amount of power as an entire small country. Something running on a Pentium 3 could have a higher TPS.