[colordrops]

No, anyone who understands the Bitcoin protocol knows that energy doesn't scale with transactions. Read the paper. You could have your laptop sign a million transactions and it would be secure.

Energy scales with competition to sign transactions. Read the Bitcoin white paper my dude.

[arcticbull]

I did, and frankly, it shows a shocking lack of understanding of economics. Which is why we find ourselves in this situation.

It's no different than you saying "read the bible!"

[colordrops]

It's completely different than the bible because it can be proven by yourself, no faith needed. There is the whitepaper and there is source code. But since you are so cynical as to not believe people, and didn't seem to understand the whitepaper, I'll explain it to you:

Transaction blocks are generated at a fixed rate, no matter how many miners are operating. This is done by adjusting the difficulty of finding a sha256 hash on the data of the transaction block. You simply need to find a hash by adding some random data to the block until you find a hash that ends in 0. The more 0s at the end of the hash, the harder to find.

Generating a sha256 hash is easily done by a laptop computer. But when huge farms of ASICs are finding the hash very quickly, the difficulty goes up to throttle the transaction rate, and many more hashes must be calculated in order to find one that meets the criteria. This is where the energy use comes from - the hash difficulty, not the number of transactions in a block - thus it scales with competition to sign blocks, rather than the number of transactions.