According to the ECB the total cost of fiat money production, fiat money storage and fiat money transportation are
roughly 1 % of the total economic output of the European union each year, which equates to roughly 140 billion at the moment.
Thank you for this.
So, for this part of FIAT (only for EUR) they (or we?) pay 1.4 bln
According to
https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption the global mining costs are $1.433 bln USD.
I know you cannot compare costs with energy directly but if you take into account that we talking about only a part of the FIAT energy costs and this only for EUR, it could turn out that BTC uses less energy than FIAT ...
If this is true, BTC uses way more energy than fiat. You have to remember that there are more euro transactions than btc. I don't have numbers here but I believe the difference is huge. For me, its obvious that btc uses more energy and that is bit of a problem to the environment.
It's possible that in coming decades we will see more environment friendly ways to produce electricity (fusion? Better fission technics? Ocean waves? Better ways to collect energy from the sun?)
(For speculation, if energy becomes too cheap, wouldn't it mean that pow loses its meaning, too)