Evidence?

Just to continue the discussion, assuming you are correct for a second this figure isn't per person using the currency is it?

World population: 7 billion (ref http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/). Lets assume that half of them use fiat currency, so 3.5 billion
Estimated bitcoin population: 500k (ref http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/197tqx/estimating_the_amount_of_bitcoin_users/)

Ratio: 7000 fiat users to each bitcoin user. So current bitcoin electricity consumption has to be 7000 times less than current fiat electricity consumption in order to be on par.

So, at a million times less energy consumption bitcoin would indeed consume less. So lets see this evidence?

Cheers, Paul.

I hadn't. That's actually very useful - this says that current bitcoin mining electricity usage is roughly 600 times less than the fiat banking system. Taking into account my previous point assumption about the cost per user, that means that, per user bitcoin mining uses 11 times more than the fiat banking system.

Talking about cost per user is important because currently bitcoin is far from at mass adoption levels, whereas fiat certainly is.

Printed paper money is legacy technology - when comparing electricity usage we really should be talking about digital fiat transfers. After all, if you were to invent some new form of currency now, that wasn't a crypto, it sure as hell would be digital.