Good to know, appreciate the explanation. So these estimates that it uses about the same energy as Argentina are probably based on a rather old price and we could get to many multiples of that if the price keeps increasing?
It also depends on the available market for asics. In bear markets, asics are very affordable as miners go out of business but the price can go up quite a lot in bull markets which affects the profitability of buying new machines.
In case you’re interested the two bitcoin forks BCH and BSV have unlimited block size and so energy/transaction validated can scale very well. Eventually all forks will have to rely on transaction fees as the block reward has a halving schedule. If something like BSV succeeds the hash rate and thus energy consumption will be a complicated combination of transaction volume, and variable transaction fees. It will essentially be a race to the bottom to see who can provide the cheapest transactions while still being profitable. I think one should expect much higher energy efficiency than something like Visa just from pure scale and the intense competition.