I would be interested to know what is the cost of that electricity per bitcoin transacted. Credit card processing fees are a small number of percent, AIUI. Is it comparable?
We're not going to stay in that relatively narrow band for long though, with the growth of this thing. There's only so much "spare" on the grid, off-peak, and this whole thing relies on wasteful means of energy production, storage and transmission.
So on one hand (hopefully) the opportunity to scavenge for cheap CPU cycles is going to contract, while the market for bitcoin expands? Yikes.
> transaction fees that are charged to the customer by the Bitcoin network have skyrocketed this year,
topping out at close to $20 a transaction last week (compared to roughly $0.20 when we initially enabled Bitcoin).
On the other hand, the high valuation can only be justified by the expectation of it being a really good tool for transactions (or, alternatively, the greater fool theory) and becoming bad at transactions means it'll eventually become also a bad store of value; so a technical solution to transaction cost is highly needed.