Just as I was wondering where to find some background on external costs of Bitcoin, Bloomberg swooped in to save the day with some reporting on the energy consumption that goes into mining Bitcoin. The article first goes a bit into the financial costs of consumed energy; that seems to be to be clearly secondary, after all, as long as those guys pay their bills, who cares what they spend their money on. More important is this: The trade-off here is that as virtual value is created, real-world value is used up. About 982 megawatt hours a day, to be exact. That’s enough to power roughly 31,000 U.S. homes, or about half a Large Hadron Collider. If the dreams of Bitcoin proponents are realized,…