340 Megawatts, at $0.12 / kWh, works out to around $340mm / year, or a permanent army of 2500 lawyers or so. I agree that bitcoin's PoW mechanism as it is toda

340 Megawatts, at $0.12 / kWh, works out to around $340mm / year, or a permanent army of 2500 lawyers or so. I agree that bitcoin's PoW mechanism as it is today has relatively poor bang for your buck, but there are many potential mechanisms for increasing efficiency by an order of magnitude or more (dPoS, state channels, sharding, etc.). Ethereum has a lot more potential to not just be a distributed ledger, but a distributed secured computer. If all you are interested in is moving around value, something like Nano might achieve that while burning far less computation that the Bitcoin network would require per transactions. We should keep in mind that when discussing Bitcoin we're comparing the first version of a nascent technology to mature financial institutions that have developed over hundreds of years.