Bitcoin consumes 4,000,000,000 W of power to process four transactions per second. A single Raspberry Pi with a database can do an order of magnitude more on 5W. Think about that next time you wonder if it's a good design.
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Which is just an argument in my favor, because those people are *not* participating in the network and are *not* actually using Bitcoin and are *not* subject to the transaction throughput limitations.