Some years ago, I worked at the Federal Reserve, on a system that moved $100B (billion!) a DAY, on a pretty reasonable server farm. Yes, there's a fair bit of energy committed to the existing financial system, but it's moving far, far more actual value with many orders of magnitude more actual exchanges than bitcoin is going.
Yeah. It's providing a useful, widely accepted, and stable currency.
But I'm addressing the argument that the energy consumption for bitcoin mining and the energy consumption of the mainstream financial system is directly comparable (they're not).
