[IkmoIkmo]

> More electricity is being burned to do the same amount of work.

You're assuming hashrates and electricity consumption are 1:1, ignoring improvements in efficiency.

> The number of transactions the bitcoin protocol can handle is essentially capped and completely unrelated to hash rate as the difficulty of producing a correct hash is adjusted based on the hash rate.

That is true, but one must also consider that transactions & value transfer is not necessarily 1:1 either. A transaction can carry information which refers to multiple transactions, or is a transaction for a billion dollars. So value transfer is not necessarily capped, although in practice of course it is right now.

Further, to say there's no relation isn't true, either. Transactions are not dependent, but they are related to hash rates to some extent, and by virtue of the protocol this will increasingly become so, as transactions will be the main source of income that funds hash rates, there is indeed a relation.

[schmichael]

> You're assuming hashrates and electricity consumption are 1:1, ignoring improvements in efficiency.

You're right, but since the price of bitcoin has risen over the past month the increase in hash rate could be due to miners turning back on less efficient equipment that wasn't profitable at lower prices.

It's really impossible to know, but since the price is rising I think it's likely additional hash power would mean more mining equipment coming online -- therefore using additional power -- while leaving existing mining hardware but still profitable hardware running.