At the current usage level, bitcoin uses as much power as about 280'000 homes (US, 340 Megawatts total, [1]). You can put an awful lot of lawyers, police, lega

At the current usage level, bitcoin uses as much power as about 280'000 homes (US, 340 Megawatts total, [1]). You can put an awful lot of lawyers, police, legal and state apparatus in 280'000 homes. It is sufficient to house all state and full-time employees of the state of Illinois [0] entirely, which unlike bitcoin can do more than transfer wealth. Illinois has a population of 12'800'000 people [2], bitcoin.info "claims" 23 Million wallet users, however that is a poor number since it only seems to count the number of wallet addresses ever used, the number of unique addresses used is closer to 500'000 and the number of daily users is 200'000 at the current date, which with some rough statistics yields a more realistic 3-8 million users. In conclusion: Employing humans to do the entire state things allows to service 1.5 to 4 times as many people as bitcoin is currently doing and it also includes a much much broader range of services than bitcoin. [0]: http://www.governing.com/gov-data/public-workforce-salaries/states-most-government-workers-public-employees-by-job-type.html http://www.governing.com/gov-data/public-workforce-salaries/... [1]: https://www.thebalance.com/how-much-power-does-the-bitcoin-network-use-391280 https://www.thebalance.com/how-much-power-does-the-bitcoin-n... [2]: https://suburbanstats.org/population/how-many-people-live-in-illinois https://suburbanstats.org/population/how-many-people-live-in...