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You can't really extrapolate the current growth rate. There is a maximum total mining revenue even if Bitcoin becomes the only globally used currency. The electricity usage likely won't exceed this unless miners begin to sell heat and displace traditional heat generation sources.

"There is a maximum total mining revenue even if Bitcoin becomes the only globally used currency.".

How are you coming to this conclusion? In addition to the coinbase, miners earn fees, which are valued according to current market conditions (supply and demand)

At current growth rate Bitcoins will each be worth over $1M by 2018. This would imply being worth 3x all of the gold ever mined.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/7hvj8e/dail...

If Bitcoin becomes the most valuable asset class in the world by two orders of magnitude (in 2020, assuming same rate), lots of crazy other side effect will occur.

Bitcoin isn't going to keep growing this fast. It'll go parabolic for a while, and then settle at a midpoint between where the rally began and where it peaked.

I think bitcoin will eventually be replaced by a PoS coin: https://medium.com/@zby/proof-of-stake-can-be-cheaper-than-p...

I think that only people who don't understand that PoS can't be done trustlessly, and don't understand why that is an issue, say that.

This seems to be the latest meme for why bitcoin can't work. The reality is that bitcoin uses as much power as it does because it is sought after at the current energy cost. If it is important to you, increase the energy cost. Bitcoin already has a fee market, and incentivized miners. If it is no longer economically feasible to mine at the current price because of energy prices, miners will cease mining until it is economically feasible again.

Bitcoin isn't to blame for cheap energy. If it is too cheap, take it up with the people selling it at that price.

> Unfortunately no mechanism seems to exist to balance security vs cost

Bitcoin does include a perfectly good mechanism to balance security vs cost: the transaction fee market. Users decide how much they want to pay in transaction fees.

The reason for the high electricity use today is the temporary block reward for mining each block. The block reward halves every three years. Once it goes away, the only thing funding Bitcoin's electricity consumption will be the transaction fees users pay. Obviously if Bitcoin does not provide enough value to users, they will not pay high fees. Electricity consumption will naturally go down to a level that matches the value people get out of the network.

Remember this next time you see an article complaining about Bitcoin's electricity use. I haven't seen a single article about this written by somebody who understands the difference between the block reward and the transaction fee market.

The final block will be mined in 2140, so we're not quite to the transaction-fee-only point yet.

The block reward in the final blocks will be 1 satoshi (1/100000000 of a bitcoin). The block reward will be completely irrelevant many years before that. We don't have to wait until 2040 for the fee market to overtake the block reward.

Mining is required for more than just the fees or the block reward.

Even if fees were zero and block rewards didn't exist, people who had bitcoin would mine so that no one else could mine and trivially double-spend (and thus devalue their bitcoin).

The value of mining is based in no small part on how valuable bitcoin are since mining is what preserves that value by preventing attackers from destroying it.

What's worse, the needed amount of electricity to secure an amount of bitcoins is relative to how much energy an attacker can expend, not some constant value which will remain low.

Users are not paying for security, they are paying for having their transaction processed. In fact, I don't see that users have any way to measure the security of the network granularly: if secure, everything works. If not, systemwide chaos ensues.

The security of the network can be measured by any user. Multiply the mining difficulty by the efficiency of mining hardware and the price of electricity and divide by 2; this is the cost of running a 51% attack.

The beauty of the mining mechanism is that having transactions processed provides security at the same time. As long as users see value in having transactions processed they will be willing to fund miners with transaction fees.

However, you're right that users aren't paying for security directly. The fee market may not actually give miners enough revenue to ensure network security. When the block reward goes away electricity consumption will certainly drop (relative to transaction volume), but it may even drop too far to the point where the network is no longer secure from 51% attacks.

«Bitcoin's energy usage is getting a lot of press of late. Deservedly, I think - it is a bit ludicrous.»

Completely undeserved IMHO. Vastly more energy is wasted by sillier things. For example worldwide Christmas decorative lights consume 2.3 GW annually (assuming it's 3× the US), which is a lot more than Bitcoin (I estimate ~1.7 GW: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15858966) and yet I don't see nearly as many news article criticizing Christmas lights for using so much electricity... Hence why the criticism is undeserved/unfair. If we can afford to power silly feel-good lights, surely we can afford to power a revolutionary decentralized permissionless censorship-resistant financial network.

Don't forget that one of the sources cited—Digiconomist—overestimates consumption by ~2×: http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci/