Bitcoin uses approximately 108,000,000 kWh of electricity and has a cost of $27,000,000 per year

Nxt will use approximately 37,000 kWh of electricity and have a cost of $33,000 per year when it reaches Bitcoin’s size

Mining is a long drawn out inefficient way of creating value.  Does the average housewife, teenager, old man at a hamburger stand care where the coins from or how they were created?  What really matters is can I use them now to buy things or transfer money around the world.  The most efficient system of using coins to transfer value is the winner.  Mining simply is wasteful.  Wasted electricity and wasted computer power that can be used elsewhere for more benefit.  Of course a miner wants to invest in a coin because it is easy to get a lot of a coin, manipulate the market, or dump.  But is that good for stability?  Is that good for a currency?  And really.... why would an investor and ultimately normal user of a currency want to invest in an inefficient system when there are better alternatives?  The obvious answer is... because bitcoin is worth real money.  That is for right now and probably for quite a while, but in the long term after better systems with more advantages come around, it could get challenged. 

I don't burn oil to mine coins. I pay a little extra to my power company to invest in renewables like wind power. It seems you have a problem with energy production methods, not cryptocurrencies themselves.

1. Bitcoin mining is much more energy efficient now with asics
2. payment networks like visa and mastercard have thousands time bigger carbon footprint, but nobody blames them?

If bitcoin replaces traditional payment networks, much much less energy will be used.

It is true, bitcoin mining is 1000 times more energy effecient on ASIC than GPU - but you must understand how business projects work:
You have a budget for your operations each year, and you have to use it all to grow faster than your competitors, or at least keep status quo.

If ASIC hardware becomes cheaper and consumes less energy, you just buy more hardware.
But your competitors also do that to keep status quo - We will get higher hash rate with the same energy consumption.

If bitcoin would replace VISA/Mastercard big banks and governments would invest billions in hardware to run the network, which would require 1000 times more energy than today. That means many nuclear power plants will be needed to run the bitcoin network, even if we discount for more power effecient ASIC coming years.

Compare the service and strongly protocol transfer of Bitcoin ... to your bank.

End of Proof.










Yes, it's an ATM of a bank ---> 

OP is idiotic.

The current financial system uses around 10,000 times more energy then bitcoin. 

Think about how much oil you burn when you have brinks trucks driving around to fill up ATMs and move cash around.

Switching to Bitcoin would save the environment.

I agree with the OP. PoS NXT truly is the next generation crypto-currency.

I repeat, I don't own any NXT. I own small amounts of BTC and Ripples.