The total bitcoin network is putting out ~ 2.8 * 10^8 mhash/s.
A butterfly Asic can deliver 5000 mhash/s at 44 watts. So in total that is 2464 Kwatts of power (and that is definitely the best case in efficiency of the network) which is about 2464 KW. So about $275000 worth of electricity a month.
Of course a lot of people were mining at 500 mhash/s for 300W with GPUs and that turns the calculation kind of ugly. Then it would be more like 168,000 KW and that would be more like $18,748,800 a month.
The company's flagship data center... is a 140,000-square-foot facility. It consists of seven independent physical pods that are linked by a corridor as long as three football fields, and which are filled with the latest hardware from IBM, Cisco, EMC, Hitachi and the like. Two of the pods run the company's powerful VisaNet payment-authorization system, three more act as backups and run Visa's internal systems, and the last two are shells awaiting an expansion of services and data requirements.
Inside the pods, 376 servers, 277 switches, 85 routers and 42 firewalls--all connected by 3,000 miles of cable--hum around the clock, enabling transactions around the globe in near real-time and keeping Visa's business running.
Gold gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.
It's probably not worse than the waste that goes into mining gold. Now that is devastating, particularly in the Third-World countries where that happens.
I dislike bitbuggers for the same reason I dislike goldbuggers.
I fully agree with Warren Buffett's sentiments on gold:
Some of the "waste" is offset because its winter and miners are using less of whatever utility they would normally be heating with.
Particularly since we use truly nasty things in the extraction process, like mercury.
Why did you put quotes around "real"? It seems like you realize "real" has no meaning when it comes to money, in which case why are you asking if one is real and one isn't?Are bitcoins as "real" as the money (or electronic records of money) in the current electronic funds transfer systems?
Also Folding and SETI@Home have existed for years.
Are bitcoins as "real" as the money (or electronic records of money) in the current electronic funds transfer systems?
Negligible, compared to the energy used on other consumer and industrial tasks. Also Folding and SETI@Home have existed for years.
IS SETI@home still a thing? That is probably the most wasteful way to use up cpu cycles lol. At least stuff like F@H has some kind of purpose. I don't know if it's actually helped at all or not but at least the goal is there.
Are bitcoins as "real" as the money (or electronic records of money) in the current electronic funds transfer systems?
what is real, Neo?