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Looking at the raw data about mining cost from a site like the one below gives you a better idea of what is happening:

https://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency

Ethereum and Monero are the reason GPUs are being snatched up by miners. The value of those coins crashed horribly earlier in the month... to the point where it was barely profitable to mine. But prices have rebounded recently, so you can expect GPUs to start selling out again soon.

When the blockchain "difficulty factor" for ETH and XMR solidly surpasses their record highs, then you will know these ASICs are really rolling out. From there it won't be long until these $700 cards can be found on Ebay for chump change.

You can track the difficulty here: https://www.coinwarz.com/diffi...

From TFA:

"I don't think anybody can make a credible claim about the current" electric power use for bitcoin mining "without actually having data from the miners."

The network hashrate is easily computed from the difficulty and block generation rate or you can look it up here:
https://www.coinwarz.com/netwo...

Today it's 13000PH/s

The antminer s9 specifications are here:
https://shop.bitmain.com/speci...

100 watts per terahash is 100 Kw per petahash.

I'm no multiplication genius, but doesn't 13,000 PH 100Kw/Ph multiply out to 1.3Gw ignoring cooling?

The estimate, with cooling, should be within an order of magnitude of that. Anything higher should be viewed with some skepticism.

You probably need to plug some numbers into some of the mining calculators at some point.

Bitcoin electricity costs aren't that high (max 50% of your mining cost), and taken account of in the price of Bitcoin.

http://www.coinwarz.com/calcul...

Plus as people move to the only viable mining hardware nowadays (ASIC's, etc.), the electricity cost is pretty stable and you can still make profit.

But people's blinkered opinions on a tech based on rumour and falsehood, especially when they don't understand economics and that it doesn't NEED to be cheap to make in order to sell, will continue to blight something that's actually a technical marvel if nothing else.

Use it or don't. I stuck GBP20 on it years back and bought something like 50 games with the proceeds over the following years. I have a handful of BitCoin in it now and it's actually given me more back than my online saving accounts over the same period. I don't really care how much electricity it took to make, the market determines the price and you can profit without knowing what the product is at all (welcome to "commodities trading").

And if electricity is "free" to certain people (solar, etc.) then BitCoin could actually turn out to be a more efficient way of monetising it than converting it to some voltage with losses, pushing it down a cable of several hundred kilometres to the grid, and then being paid a pittance of a taxpayer subsidy for the effort of doing so. In fact, even if it's "not free", if the electricity comes from the right sources, you might even find that its more profitable to convert it to Bitcoin + heat than it would be to sell it on or even use it for other purposes.

It's been done: http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency/coins/casinocoin

(Not my creation, of course)

Who cares about the absolute value of any particular coin? What matters is the ratio of its value to mining difficulty - i.e. how much $$$ you can mine per day. CoinWarz maintains a list, and there are mining pools now which automatically switch coins based on which one is the most profitable currently (and immediately exchange them for BTC at the end of the round).