My writer have the opposite thought: http://bitcoinweekly.com/articles/the-wasted-electricity-objection-to-bitcoin-part-i

Since there is no way to know how many failed attacks there have been on the bitcoin block chain (i.e. rogue miners trying to out-hash the honest miners) there is no way to measure how much waste there has been in computing the hashes that secure the chain.

I totally agree.. I was thinking about this issue of waste. I realised that putting energy and cpu power into a defensive system is a great idea. Once you combine the concept with a distributed system it basically turns miners into a defensive crpto army that is voluntarily paid for by the transaction fee. Almost like armies defending trade routes of a traditional trade system.

I just wrote something on it

http://servanlog.blogspot.com/2011/05/infostate-and-colour-of-money.html

I imagine the same kind of waste of resources took place during traditional gold rushes. It's all meaningless though -- the bitcoin network isn't threatened by the bad decisions by miners because of the self regulation.

Then you have no idea how much energy it takes to just refine iron.

The definition of 'waste' is subjective. Just because the world is not doing what one thinks the world SHOULD be doing, does not make it a bad place (well, maybe a bad place to you)

Yes, because the raw coal used to fuel forges for HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF BANKS ACROSS THE WORLD is less pollutionary than 1 years worth of mildly increased electricity usage.  Not to mention the pure GAS GUZZLERS that are required to carry massive amounts of steel and specialized machinery required to produce such secure bank vaults.

Quit this purely conjectural bullshit and show some actual numbers.

There is 39.3 kJ/g energy from combusting coal.  It releases 2.0 grams CO2 per gram of coal. (source
Using this graph, and finding an approximation on wolfram alpha (notice that 1*10^12, or 1 thash/s lines up at a relatively easy to judge spot on the curve, and i'm going from 0 to 85.134 where the graph is equal to 4*10^12, or 4thash/s, the estimated value right now), we find that the average value is 363.637 ghash/s over 2 years.  Using the calculation here,

31.42 billion MHashs/day * 0.024 kWh/day per MHash = 754 million kWh or 2714000000 megajoules

Considering steel requires roughly 8,000 MJ/ton of steel to produce, the entire energy used in the bitcoin network could produce 339250 tons of steel.

Considering there are a staggering number of secure vaults (In the hundred thousands across the world), each of which is several hundreds of tons, 300,000 tons of steel doesn't seem like much.  And that's not even accounting for the mining, shipping, construction, the energy used by security systems, etc.

EDIT: Dear god I spent way too much time on that.

Seeing as my miner hasn't generated any coins in the last half hour, I went back in time half an hour and changed the target address. I just changed it back right now.

Happy? 

=(

At the risk of getting yelled at by the experienced members...I would agree the resources are being wasted.

Would you not get the same outcome if the hashing difficultly remained fairly low but the generating of blocks was throttled by dispersing real work to miners some how? Some sort of hybrid bitcoin/folding@home project. So as more miners come on line more folding happens and the blocks keep coming in a the same rate. I would imagine someone would even pay money for such crazy processing power. Just throwing that out there without a full understanding of how this works.