What's shocking and ridiculous is that upwards of $100 billion in electricity is squandered globally annually on stand-by devices and other painfully obvious sources of waste.

But this attracts essentially zero concern or commentary.

Do you notice any asymmetry in the scrutiny being applied to the status quo and to bitcoin et al.? The status quo-- wasteful beyond measure--is just fine: nobody questions the staggering waste built into the status quo, from hundreds of millions of devices consuming electricity but doing no work to hundreds of millions of vehicles idling in traffic for hours each and every day across the globe--nope, the really big issue is bitcoin / blockchain consumption.

Does anyone question how much electricity the vast server farms of Google and Facebook consume in order to serve up adverts and store photos of puppies and kittens? And how about the energy consumed by the NSA and the dozens of National Security agencies that have proliferated over the past 16 years? How much coal gets burned to serve adverts, archive photos of puppies and kittens, and store billions of emails, phone calls to Aunt Sadie, etc. for future analysis? (Dear old Sadie could be a jihadist--ya never know...)