Ridiculous comparison. They are working on other transactions as well. Currently a bitcoin transaction uses 427kWh.
One thing that is interesting to think about is that once block rewards go away, increasing the transaction capacity of the chain will probably lower energy usage. Competition on transaction fees will dry up if more transactions can fit on the chain per minute, reducing the total reward from fees and making mining unprofitable until total network electricity costs go down (by miners shutting down) until equilibrium is reached again.
But txn fees are still only 15% of the total block reward so those effects won't really matter for a while. If satoshi had predicted this rise in value, he would have made the block rewards drop faster than once every 4 years. Secure network consensus is not what the mining market is getting paid by, it's getting paid by the $140k USD created out of thin air every 10 minutes.
Plasma (Ethereum) and Lightning Network (BitCoin (SHA256), Litecoin (scrypt),) will likely offload a significant amount of transaction volume and thereby reduce the kWh/transaction metrics.
> [...] If Bitcoin mining really does begin to consume vast quantities of the global electricity supply it will, it follows, spur massive growth in efficient electricity production—i.e. the green energy revolution. Moore’s Law was partially a story about incredible advances in materials science, but it was also a story about incredible demand for computing that drove those advances and made semiconductor research and development profitable. If you want to see a Moore’s-Law-like revolution in energy, then you should be rooting for, and not against, Bitcoin. The fact is that the Bitcoin network, right now, is providing a $200,000 bounty every 10 minutes (the mining reward) to the person who can find the cheapest energy on the planet.
So, (speculative_valuation - cost) is the margin. Whereas with a stock in a leveraged high-frequency market with shorting, (shareholder_equity - market_cap) is explainable in terms of the market information that is shared.
But the point about Bitcoin maintaining demand for and while we move to competitive lower cost renewable energy and greater efficiency is good.
What we should hope to see is the blockchain industry directly investing in clean energy capacity development in order to rationally minimize their primary costs and maximize environmental sustainability.
