New york city used 5GW of electricity in 2001
With bitcoin mining, lets assume 1W/GH of power is required, per hour.
That means 8000KW is required for 8000TH/S network hash rate, per hour.
Now lets assume difficulty doubles every month, as it has been.
8000KW (present)
16000KW (in 2 months)
32000KW (in 3 months)
64000KW (in 4 months)
128000KW (in 5 months)
256000KW (in 6 months)
512000KW (in 7 months)
1GW (in 8 months)
2GW (in 9 months)
4GW (in 10 months)
8GW (in 11 months)
16GW (in 12 months)
32GW (in 13 months)
64GW (in 14 months)
So in 14 months, we would see more power consumption than New york city ANNUALLY in a
single hour of bitcoin mining
Obviously the wattage will become more efficient as we build better miners, but there is no way it can keep up. You would have to see a 2x efficiency improvement every month... and we have not seen that. But even if you slow down my numbers to account for that, it would still happen in less than a decade.
Eventually the entire world will double its power consumption because of Bitcoin.. and then triple it...
I am pretty confident we are FUCKED, gentlemen.
Luckily your numbers seem to be off though.
In 2007 New York used 65,591GWh of electricity.
http://observer.com/2008/04/new-york-city-reaches-for-the-sun-but-for-now-were-not-even-close/For the sake of simplicity, let's assume the Bitcoin network is currently running at 1W/GH/s @ 8,000,000 GH/s.
So per hour the Bitcoin network uses 8,000kWh * 24 * 365 = 70,080GWh of electricity per year.
That's a bit more than New York in 2007, but less than 0.4% of the global electricity consumption of the whole world in 2002. Not accounting for variation, this would make miners responsible for 0.4% of electricity used in their respective country, based on numbers from 2002 (it's fairly safe to assume that global energy consumption has grown since then).
(19,320,360 GWh per year according to Wikipedia)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumptionOf course the argument still stands that the higher the BTC price, the higher the electricity consumption of the Bitcoin network because miners are able to spent more money on electricity and still make a profit. So if we would reach 100,000 USD / BTC at the current coin release rate we'd probably be fucked. However I don't see this anytime soon and due to regular block halving, higher prices become more and more sustainable without miners pumping more and more electricity into the network.
Also, at 100,000 USD most Bitcoiners or long time miners would probably be able to built their own solar plants, thus fostering the renewable energy sector and making the world a better place once more
)) ?