> There is a solution to this problem. If someone releases a new Bitcoin client (and miners) that run on only 1% of the available processing power, and gets mor

> There is a solution to this problem. If someone releases a new Bitcoin client (and miners) that run on only 1% of the available processing power, and gets more than 50% of the network to adopt this new client, then total electricity costs drop would drop hugely No, because you can't cryptographically enforce that all compatiable clients use only 1% of their available processing power. If such a client took over the bitcoin network, somebody would use a patched version of that client that pretended to use only 1% of the computing power, but actually used all of it. There's no way the other clients could know, so the whole spiral would start anew.