This means that if difficulty is that high, it’s only because some people, somewhere, accept to spend that much processing power into bitcoin mining. Maybe those people have a lower electricity cost than the one you mention, maybe they just don’t care about costs and want to mine bitcoin for fun, maybe they use solar panels. Who knows.

The point is: if one spend more money to make money, then the difficulty will probably decrease until a better equilibrium is found.

Also: mining bitcoin is not compulsory. If you think it’s a waste of energy, just don’t do it.

Additionally, most effective Bitcoin miners are using GPU (usually in mining pools) to generate BTC — depending on the GPU, the electrical cost to generate BTC could be significantly less that $0.36/BTC, and if someone were to write a mining client that could take advantage of the crypto capabilities of certain low power hardware like the VIA C7 or an optimized FPGA based platform, this electrical cost per BTC could go down even more.

I can’t help but think that the author has missed the point, the minting mechanism exists to distribute the coins, bitcoins are not supposed to represent “free” money.

If bitcoin takes off as a widely used currency, most participants won’t gain their bitcoins through mining.