If the high turnover is done between trusted parties, or with settlement time, then it doesn't matter to security. It needs to be people accepting large amounts from strangers/untrusted counter-parties and giving stuff for it immediately. But usually, if I send someone $1000, they can wait 3 hours for security.

>Also, when a bank charges me 1% for a wire transfer, they pay salaries from that money and some people buy food.

When a bank has lights on, burns fuel to send an armored truck around, etc, that's also wasted.

World wide standby power waste must be 1000 times more than what bitcoin uses - world wide power usage ~17TWH, 1% standby power waste => 170GWH.

I'm pretty sure that all the power dedicated by the banks to perform the same opperations as bitcoin (people driving to work, office building power, air conditioning, datacenters power, and so on) is signifficantly more than 40MWH.

So, just the global standby power waste is orders of magnitude greater than what bitcoin uses, and banks probably use a lot more power to perform the same opperations as bitcoin does.

If you pay a 1$ fee to a bank or a bitcoin fee, that 1$ will recirculate back into the economy. The difference is the banks are a lot more inefficient and are such human resources hogs because of their exclusive right to create money out of thin air.

> Because if somebody can spend $1mln to perform 51% attack and move around $1bln, that will likely be done.

Then why hasn't it been done? The answer is that bitcoin doesn't even remotely work like this. You would have to sign a transaction, then double spend it to yourself, then BY CHANCE mine enough blocks to satisfy the person giving you whatever you are buying before they see the double spend.

That is not going to happen. Someone receiving a million dollars will not give over a briefcase of cash the second they see the transaction, and that's the only way something like this would work. If you are taking money out of an exchange, the exchange would never even credit your account, let alone send you money. They would see the double spend transaction and if by some chance (0.015625%) you managed to mine the next 6 blocks or so, they would just wait longer since there is a double spend out there. By the time they might actually send you money, the chances of you mining all the blocks up until that time is practically zero. So you would then be gambling your million dollars against enormous odds.

You might not want to believe that bitcoin works, and it might seem counter intuitive that the proof of work is important and useful, but this isn't about how you wish the world works, it is about how the world ACTUALLY works, and that is why bitcoin actually works.

This attack allows double spending and censorship. It does not allow to directly steal someone's BTC.

> Also, when a bank charges me 1% for a wire transfer, they pay salaries from that money and some people buy food.

And horses are pissed at cars.

> The power burnt by BitCoin is actually literally immediately irrecoverably physically wasted.

No, it is not. It buys security in a way which traditional banking is not capable of providing.

So basically they are paying bunch of people to live and consume without doing anything useful. How much power wasted is that? How do you know how much wasted day of human life costs?