[mlyle]

> And to add to the "it costs 657.6kWh to process a transaction": energy is used to produce a block, which contains an arbitrarily defined number of transactions. Right now, Bitcoin Core limits each block to 1MB, which works out to about 2k transactions per block. If Bitcoin Core were to increase the limit to say 10MB, the energy used to produce a block doesn't change, but the energy used to process a transaction goes down tenfold.

Oh, it could be somewhat improved. Then it'd be "only" 65 kilowatt hours, compared to ~1 watt-hour for conventional payment networks.

(And, this assumes that the increase in bitcoin price doesn't cause more mining).

[Anderkent]

>Then it'd be "only" 65 kilowatt hours, compared to ~1 watt-hour for conventional payment networks.

Sure, and? You get other benefits, those might not be relevant for you in which case keep using conventional payment networks. But if things like counterparty risk of your payment processor come into your calculations, even $10 dollars a transaction migth be a good deal.

[aseipp]

The entire point of this subthread you're responding to is that the cost of transactions is so energy intensive that those "other benefits" are null and void.

It's called an externality. It doesn't matter if you'd pay $10 for it if the cost imposed is too great. There are a lot of things people would absolutely pay for that we don't allow, because of that. Dumb weird fantasies about decentralization or counterparty risk or whatever don't actually matter if the energy cost is that high. It's just not important enough. Sorry.

[Anderkent]

> It's called an externality. It doesn't matter if you'd pay $10 for it if the cost imposed is too great

The cost imposed is proportional to the fee, since the fee has to pay for the electricity used to mine the transaction. And $10 of electricity is just... not a lot to worry about.

If you believe the electricity consumption in general has huge externalities, you have bigger problems than mining, and once you address those the mining cost/diffiuclty will adjust

[mlyle]

> The cost imposed is proportional to the fee, since the fee has to pay for the electricity used to mine the transaction.

No. Miners get rewards for mining blocks, which pay for 80%. Transaction fees don't pay for the electricity used in a transaction: not even close.

> If you believe the electricity consumption in general has huge externalities

Well, sure, I believe that electricity is artificially cheap. I also believe that spending $50+ of electricity per transaction done is absolutely nuts. And that amount is steadily increasing...

[Anderkent]

Hm, OK, I was wrong about the ratio of fees to reward. Good news is that reward is going to halve every 4 years so in 12 years it's probably going to be much more even.

[mlyle]

Sorry, but even if we significantly improve things such that a transaction "only" takes the equivalent of a few days of my electricity use.. that's not so great. There's better ways to do this that don't require mining.

Indeed, from a decentralization perspective, mining is looking worse than proof of stake, etc.