What this means is there's a lot of money willing to buy hashing power instead of private jets or space trips. Would it be more eco-friendly to burn all that gas instead?
The current energy consumption levels is an anomaly due to the recent parabolic price increase. It's completely unecessary as its only use is making transactions in blocks harder to rollback, which is what gives faith that your incoming payments will still be valid when you need to spend them.
At the moment, it's about $90K every 10 minutes that would be required to rollback a transaction. This means if you buy a coffee, you can rent about $90K of hashing power to overwrite the block containing your coffee transaction to another address you own. Completely unecessary. Even for car purchases, it's completely unecessary. Who has all that money to burn on such ridiculous security? I have no idea. It's as if you guarded the garage containing your 2005 corrola with a small military force. Some people feel the need though, so more power to them!
