Using reason and logic only. Leave the emotion and speculation to the other threads please!!!
Let me match your request with another request: If you want to get useful answers please do some research first. Your questions betray misunderstandings of the most basic bitcoin concepts. When you post you consume other people's time. Quote
1. Assuming silicon ASICs have now approached their limit, how much energy (in Watts) would be required if there were 10bn people on the planet and there was an average of 10 transactions per person, per day?
The energy requirement for processing a transaction are very small and are completely unrelated to mining ASICs. Mining ASICS do not process transactions. They provably expend energy to make reversal of the history of transactions infeasible and for a given security level consume the same amount of energy regardless of the transaction level.That's all very fine. The "transaction" is useless unless it's confirmed by miners. The energy question (10bn people * 10 transactions per day) still stands.
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2. Is there any way to get the transaction time down to below 10 seconds? (i.e. suitable for buying a coffee or paying for my groceries)
You are confusing transaction time and transaction confirmation time. Bitcoin transactions are basically instantaneous (just the time it takes to communicate the data) but it takes time for the transaction to become irreversible. The same is true for other payment mechanisms, e.g. credit card transactions can often be reversed for months, checks take weeks to clear... Making a 1:1 comparison is hard because Bitcoin is used in different ways from traditional payment systems (including anonymously). But it is not the case that the 10 minutes mean time between blocks itself has any fundamental implication for buying coffee. Quote
3. Is centralization of the network inevitable?
Thats up to the users of Bitcoin.
