RE: Public blockchains: Thinking about opportunities - Part 1
Hello Johano.
The answer to this question could be estimated by looking at the reward given to miners.
Bitcoin miners are mostly professional miners that need to make a profit. It's a risky business that requires an important investment and you need to spend lot of time configuring and securing your mining farm. So you definitely want a good cut. Bitcoin is giving about 5 million a day to miners. I think more than half is spent in electricity. Some say it's rather 90% though. If 2.5million$ are spent daily in electricity (so 50%), it better be the cheapest possible. That's why miners go to China or India where the price is 0.08$/kWh. So my guess would be that bitcoin network uses 31.25 millions of kWh a day. To give you an idea, recent statistics showed that an American home uses 900kWh a month.
Thanks. So much energy ! And no end to see!
Perhaps it is more a philosophical question whether all this effort is necessary and good for our society as a whole.
To answer the other part of your question about the futur, it is complicated to tell.
Bitcoin will stay like this for a few years for sure as you need electric power to have mining power. It is the same for Ethereum at the moment, but Ethereum planned since the beginning to evolve to a Proof of Stake where block validation won't be won with hashing power but with the Ether that you hold. I don't know if you are familiar with those principles but the main goals behind a switch to Proof of Stake is environmental reasons (no more electricity waste fight) and safety (someone who hold Ether have a good reason to be honest and validate correctly on the network than someone who doesn't have Ether).
Thanks, that is helpful.