Quote from: Collider on July 01, 2014, 06:26:23 AM

[...]

Mining uses a miniscule amount of energy compared to all the wasteful use of electricity in the United States alone.

How come the electricity consumption per capita is more than 2.5* that of Germany?

If everyone of the 318m US citizens would reduce power consumption by only 10% (easily achieved by switching lightbulbs...), it would save 25 700 MW of generation capacity alone.

You can do all the bitcoin mining of your hearts´content with that, and then some.

This statement is just very shortsighted. Minuscule is only bitcoin's market cap compared to the world's whole economy.

Quote from: BurtW on July 01, 2014, 03:45:16 PM

[...]

= 4.3128 GW

World power production from:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation

is about 2311.4 GW.

So Bitcoin would use about 0.1866 % of world electrical output in this maximum build out scenario.

BTW in the above scenario the difficulty would be 753,000,000,000

That is today, at 600$/BTC. Let's assume 6000$/BTC and you'll already be using 1.866% of the world's elecricity use but still be a minuscule economy. (directly following from the calculation above)

This by the way also means hidden cost of the bitcoin network paid by everybody because of increasing electricity prices due to increased demand.