A gentleman's agreement between a certain faction of econ-crypto-tinfoil-hat-botnet nerds to assign trade value to the wastage of increasingly large amounts of electricity.
Best description I've seen yet. Granted, I'm impressed with how much momentum they seem to have already collected, so I feel like their implementation is sound, but still tin-foily.
They are working on a real problem though. Paypal kind of works, but isn't ideal.
I'm fairly certain that more money is spent to create & manage a single US dollar in circulation than is used for a single bitcoin unit. The latter has no paper form, no need to be physically lugged around, no ongoing R&D design overhead spent on counter-counterfeiting measures, no Department of Treasury budget costs, no Secret Service budget costs, no banks or bank vaults, no armored trucks with armed guards lugging money bags... I could go on but I'll stop.
To address from a different angle, the phenomenon where you say electricity is being "wasted" to produce a bitcoin is analogous to the creation of a US dollar. Not to the using of it or acquiring of it. You can buy and acquire a bitcoin fairly quickly and cheaply, CPU/electricity-wise. Much more so than if you had to "mine" it. Much like dollars. Much cheaper/easer/faster to "buy" a dollar than to construct one out of thin air. (A legal one, anyway.)
