I don't fear this will be a big issue by then, when Bitcoin becomes way more popular energy efficiency will become a more important factor and chips will have to become more energy efficient if the miners want to make a profit.
THats incorrect. It doesnt matter how energy efficient you make them, once these hardware prices have come down to something near marginal cost, electricity cost will be the overriding factor for miners, and the only real limit on network growth. More efficient chips would just result in almost proportionally lower mining cost per TH, which will results in a proportionally higher network speed, and thus rendering the higher efficiency pointless. Have a look here:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/finally-a-correct-endgame-difficulty-calculator-295270For a given BTC price and electricity cost, you can pretty much calculate how many megawatt bitcoin will consume. The only way to prevent that would be if hardware became more expensive somehow, so that the hardware investment would be a bigger brake. Not very likely with asics.
The total energy consumption will be increased for a while, but it will be slowed down by growing power costs and shrinking rewards (no, the fees won't compensate for the block halvings). Even with current conditions, the potential maximum Bitcoin price (if market cap equals to that of USD in today's prices) is around $55,000, and that would (using that spreadsheet from a thread you linked) amount to only 60 Gigawatts. That's just a hair in today's global power consumption, and remember that in practice it'll be even lower than that.
In other news, you are a troll.
M2 money supply = $10,789B
Bitcoin market cap = $1.576B
10786/1.576 ~ 6846x
Today's price ~ $120
6846 * $120 =
$821,543Assuming (incorrectly) that the only fiat that can be displaced is the US dollar.
Times 1.36M a year, divided by avg $0.10/kW (It'd be much cheaper if you put the bitcoin hardware at the powerplant to avoid transmission losses)
1.36M * 821543 / .1 =1.117 e13 kW-h per year
About 8766 hours a year
1.117 e13 / 8766 = 1274582135 kW =
1.274 TWThat is an ecological disaster. Not to mention dirty, nasty sources of electricity will be used in an attempt to bring down the cost per kW-h (which will result in an increase in the total watts needed for equilibrium).
