Can it really be true that the Bitcoin system consumes almost $1.000.000 in electricity per day? So I've been trying to figure out how much running the Bitcoin system really costs using the following numbers:


Total Bitcoin Hash Rate: 300.000.000 GH/s 
Hashrate of an ANTMINER S4 (currently one of the most efficient ASICs): 2.000 GH/s Power
power consumption of an ANTMINER S4: 1.400W 
Energy price: $0.15/kWh
300.000.000 / 2.000 = 150.000 Antminers
150.000 * 1400W = 210.000.000W
210.000.000W * 24 hours = 5.040.000.000 Wh = 5.040.000 kWh
5.040.000 * $0.15 = 756.000$


Taking into account other less efficient rigs around $1.000.000 seems (theoretically) realistic to me, but I just can't wrap my head around Bitcoin costing $364.000.000 per year. What am I doing wrong?
Of course. At the current block reward of 25 BTC per block, on average 3600 BTC are mined per day which are worth over $1 million.

If it were significantly much cheaper than $1M (in terms of energy costs) to mine that $1M worth of coins, more people would do so, thus the difficulty would go up, thus the energy costs would go up.

By definition, the energy costs to mine x amount of bitcoins will never be significantly less than the actual worth of those bitcoins.

By the way, "wasting" (well, not really) only $365M per year is an incredible efficient improvement over the current banking system worldwide. The huge costs, waste of resources, and TONS of other collateral damage that come with the fiat currency infrastructure is astronomical, and saying that it's much, MUCH more than the costs of Bitcoin is even still an understatement.