Still less than the carbon footprint of the people running our current fiat-based financial infrastructure.
It's the bankers who have jets, mansions and yachts, not the bitcoiners.
Edit to clarify:
Not that riches is somehow "wrong" - it's just that with major value comes major costs, which in practice mean major energy usage.
Why does the currency have anything to do with the wealth of the bankers.
Bitcoin is, as far as i know, a fiat currency too. The value depends on the believe (demand-supply) of the people. You accepting it as means of payment gives it value.
The reason bankers and others have yachts are interests, Investmens, tax avoidance schemes and so on. Nothing Bitcoin solves. The issue is a political one and how we do business and laws.
One is literally supporting the world and the other is used by a few million people as a speculative asset, money laundering scheme or to buy drugs online.
And on top of that you're wrong...
And please explain how my question is ignorant but the stance you're taking isn't?
Bitcoin isn’t using any energy, bitcoin is a marketplace where security of financial asset is represented in terms of energy expenditure.
You may not like how much energy is spent on maintaining security, but it’s not bitcoin that necessitates it, it’s the market.
Bitcoin opened a Pandora’s box by showing the world how it can be done and now if people say they want an attacker to take 1gigawatt to overtake the network then that’s what will be spent to protect against such attack. With or without bitcoin.
> If you made a Bitcoin miner that is two times more efficient - it wouldn’t lead to reduction in energy use, it would lead to increase in difficulty requirement
this is not considered problematic for something meant to replace current army-based currency. It points toward a direction where the economy becomes a zero-sum game.
Security of assets is understood to be best effort and preventive measures are well known to be unreliable (often replaced by inefficient punitive measures).
Bitcoin strives to build a trustless economy and thus its operation has far greater costs (fraud prevention with usual money generally costs proportionally with fraud attempts, while bitcoin is constantly tuned to 100% prevention).
In a more fair comparison we should compare the cost of all the world police + law enforcement + armies to the cost of mining energy + mining hardware and even given conservative estimates of corruption it isn't clear which side would be better under the total cost metric.
We could stop here and consider bitcoin an (almost) infallible trustless economy based on burning commodities compared to our usual fallible economy based on trust and force.
Personally I fell that this comparison suggest that bitcoin _should_ remain like it is today, relatively small with little influence on the world as a whole but readily available to who might need its peculiar service.
Bitcoin