[deadmetheny]

If the incentive to do so was there, banks could become more energy efficient. Bitcoin, however, cannot do this, by definition. PoW systems require server farms to bang out hashes as fast as possible, and the complexity of that calculation increases as the mining pool increases. So there's more power being used than several entire small countries to perform something like 100 transactions a second. Say what you will about the traditional banking system, but it's not set up to burn massive amounts of power by design, and it actually manages a throughput of tens of thousands of transactions a second for actual business purposes rather than just making play money for money-flush nerds and criminals.

[nonbel]

>"banks could become more energy efficient. Bitcoin, however, cannot do this, by definition...there's more power being used than several entire small countries to perform something like 100 transactions a second."

I don't see how bitcoin cannot become more efficient "by definition". In fact it is a very straightforward process. All you have to do is add more zeros onto here and get people to use it.

  /** The maximum allowed weight for a block, see BIP 141 (network rule) */
  static const unsigned int MAX_BLOCK_WEIGHT = 4000000;

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/consensus...

The actual limitation is storage, bandwidth, and memory costs. If those become cheaper then there is no reason not to increase that value.

[deadmetheny]

Sure, theoretically, except in practice when they actually try to do that, the community flips its shit and we end up with hard forks into shit like Bitcoin Cash and the shit show keeps rolling.

[nonbel]

As mentioned, the problem is that increasing that value enough to matter could increase the storage/etc costs of monitoring the blockchain to an extent that would be prohibitive for many people.

If those costs come down then the "efficiency" can be increased without any impact. It looks like in the last decade they dropped about 10-100x:

https://hblok.net/storage_data/storage_memory_prices-2017-12...

http://drpeering.net/FAQ/What-are-the-historical-transit-pri...

[wmf]

Even if you increase the block size, PoS is still 99% more efficient.