Energy cost of bitcoin vs physical currency? The bitcoin mining infrastructure uses a certain amount of energy and processing power to operate.
The resource usage is often cited as part of arguments critical of bitcoin.
But relatively speaking how much more resources does bitcoin mining take compared to physical currency?
No body really talks about all the resources that it takes to use physical currency.

The money first has to be produced in a mint.  That mint and the machines in it had to be built.  These are all of course specialty machines and are probably very expensive.  The building and machines require energy to operate.  They all need to be maintained.  And people need to be employed to do all those things.

Money is typically stored in banks.  There are thousands of bank locations in the world.  They all needed to be constructed.  And those buildings all require resources and people to operate.

Physical currency must actually be moved.  Moving any significant amount of physical currency requires security.  A large store typically has to hire an armored car to transport money from their safe to the bank.  An entire niche industry needs to exist to produce those vehicles.  Security workers need to be employed to operate them and protect the money.

Money must be stored.  Millions of safes/vaults were built so individuals, businesses, and banks can store their money.  In general there is a lot of resources spent on securing physical currency.
The most extensive research on this topic is:&quot;An Order-of-Magnitude Estimate of the Relative Sustainability of the Bitcoin Network&quot; by Hass McCook
among others, it cover specific topic as the economic and environmental cost of cash printing &amp; coin minting, banking system, gold mining &amp; recycling etc ...
The results of the research are summarized in the tables below.

take in mind that these data are from 2014, so Bitcoin cost of production and consumption are actually much higher.

These are the estimation about miners efficiency at the time, when the network hashrate was 130 Phash/s and the most efficient miner was Antminer S3 with 0.766 w/Ghash:

I redid the calculations using current hashrate of 186 Ehash/s, an efficiency of miners ranging from 0.1 w/Gh of Antminer S9 to S19 0.03 w/Gh and keeping all other assumptions the same, these are the results:

About 70/80 times more consumption than was in 2014 (depending on which energy efficiency you pick as network average). Certainly the costs of the other activities (banking, mining, minting) have also increased, but not in this size.
Although the research in question is detailed, the author was honest in saying that the data is not an accurate representation of reality, but an estimate of its order of magnitude.