Quote from: BurtW on August 24, 2014, 12:58:53 PM

A price of $252,000 in era 0 (50 BTC/block) would have caused the Bitcoin network to attempt to consume about 30% of all the electrical power produced on the planet.

A price of $252,000 in this era, era 1 (25 BTC/block) would cause the Bitcoin network to attempt to consume about 15% of all the electrical power produced on the planet.

So, in order to keep the Bitcoin network from attempting to consume more than 1% of all the power produced we should all hope that the price does not reach that level until at least era 5 - about 2029 or so.

Of course all of these numbers are rough "back of the envelope" estimates:

Code:

Original target Subsidy Est Fees Power % of total world
Era starting year BTC/block BTC/hour GW power production
--- --------------- ----------- ---------- ------ ----------------
  0 2009 50.00000000 0.00000000 680.40 29.44%
  1 2013 25.00000000 0.00000000 340.20 14.72%
  2 2017 12.50000000 0.00000000 170.10 7.36%
  3 2021 6.25000000 0.00000000 85.05 3.68%
  4 2025 3.12500000 0.00000000 42.53 1.84%
  5 2029 1.56250000 0.00000000 21.26 0.92%
  6 2033 0.78125000 1.31250000 13.61 0.59%
  7 2037 0.39062500 3.65625000 13.61 0.59%
  8 2041 0.19531250 4.82812500 13.61 0.59%
  9 2045 0.09765625 5.41406250 13.61 0.59%

Can you list your assumptions? For starters, are you assuming constant power production and constant power price? Because neither of those will hold whatsoever on the timescales you're talking about.