Honestly I didn't even read the article because of the number of ads. I'm curious (though not enough to go look at the moment) if the author added the ads just because of it hitting HN.
15 karma · joined January 19, 2012
Bitcoin alone is estimated to use 150 terawatt-hours of electricity annually.
The US Department of Energy estimates that there are 80 million households with dishwashers in the US (although they believe 16m never use them, but we will ignore that). It appears that the average dishwasher uses 251kWh annually (at the avg of 215 cycles per year).
So this would put the US annual dishwasher power consumption to around 20 terawatt-hours. This would mean that the rest of the world would need approximately 518 million household dishwashers used 215 times a year each, to make up the rest of the power usage for just Bitcoin.
When you start factoring in the size difference in dishwashers between countries, the power usage differences between 120v and 220v in different parts of the world, the overall adoption rate of dishwashers etc... it makes it hard to believe that they could compete with crypto power usage.
Video (city government quality): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReeLuUh8qB4