[Wayne 962]

I'll stand by my previous statements. Bitcoin is a fringe technology, used pretty much only by speculators, is not used for hardly any practical/legal commerce, and the support of this fringe system uses more electricity than the entire country of Argentina. As with most people arguing about random stuff these days, it comes down to "Scope and Scale". In this case, the scope of Bitcoin's usage is minuscule, yet the scale of it's energy usage is obscene, particularly in relationship to the scale of the other systems that you quote - namely the stock market, which is utilized by millions, if not billions of people to aid in the flow of capital. It does not make any sense to compare the current energy usage of the stock market (which stock market are you referring to in particular?) to the current energy costs of Bitcoin.

It is important to note that my comments / statements apply to Bitcoin only at this time. As I have said several times already in this thread, I believe that Bitcoin is version 1.0.0, and will go the way of MySpace, Netscape Navigator, and the Yahoo Directory. The blockchain is a very good idea, and some type of new platform in the future that fixes all of Bitcoins inherent and built-in problems will probably surface to supplant it.

-Wayne