Even if we accept their estimates -- and of course, given that this coming from a mining company, we wouldn't have the slightest reason not to! --<p>It is straight up dishonest to attempt to draw a comparison based solely on total <i>network</i> footprint. As the authors of the "whitepaper" are fully aware, what everyone is concerned with is the alarmingly high BTC footprint per <i>transaction</i>. In addition to who exactly benefits from all this insane footprint generation, at the end of the day.
But how many billions of transactions are these networks handling? BTC is using vastly more power per transaction. What would be the power usage of BTC if it were scaled up to support an actual useful number of transactions?
<i>cough</i> Bitcoin Cash <i>cough</i><p>Increasing the blocksize was always Satoshi's plan:<a href="https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg15366" rel="nofollow">https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg153...</a><p>This means that when the coinbase rewards run out, the fees pay for the mining. Small fees, keeping the network useful, for billions of transactions (bandwidth and storage costs decrease according to Moore's law). With this final state, individual on-chain transactions would not take much energy at all.