[mrb]

«Can someone explain how transactions are not insanely cost prohibitive»

Because the comments above yours are misleading. Transactions don't consume mining energy. Miners expend the same amount of energy regardless if they are validating 1 or 1000 transactions in a block.

[arcticbull]

That’s some high class mental gymnastics though. Because if you divide the energy spent across the number of transactions you land back where you started. And if the energy was burned for 0 transaction capacity then the underlying would be worthless. Secure but worthless. So it doesn’t take much inference to realize that the value is in transactbility.

You’ll have to explain to me why when mining a block of transactions, it doesn’t make sense to break that down on a per transaction basis with division.

If the number of transactions in a block ever changes I’ll change my divisor. Until then the proof is on you isn’t it?

[mrb]

«it doesn’t make sense to break that down on a per transaction basis with division»

Because the division result is meaningless as it just reflects how full a block was, not the cost of a transaction. Again: miners expend the same amount of energy regardless if they are validating 1 or 1000 transactions in a block. Exactly the same amount. And whatever math you might be doing doesn't account for batched transactions (1 tx, N outputs), lighting transactions, or off-chain transaction (think tx within a platform like an exchange).

[arcticbull]

> Again: miners expend the same amount of energy regardless if they are validating 1 or 1000 transactions in a block.

For one that’s horrifyingly wasteful - you say it like it’s a good thing but it’s really not. And two, I’m describing the network as it exists today. That’s not dishonest; there’s no plan to increase the quantity of transactions per block. If it ever changes we can run the numbers again. But saying it’s a bad way to run the numbers is like saying there’s no cap on the number of bitcoins because the core team could just change the cap. Ok, and if they do, we’ll run the math again.

[mrb]

«For one that’s horrifyingly wasteful - you say it like it’s a good thing but it’s really not. »

It is a great thing: it means Bitcoin can scale without increasing energy consumption. See, that's my problem with the way you phrased your post. You misrepresent the system. You imply transactions consume energy when they don't.

[arcticbull]

> It is a great thing: it means Bitcoin can scale without increasing energy consumption. See, that's my problem with the way you phrased your post. You misrepresent the system. You imply transactions consume energy when they don't.

You pretend they don’t but they obviously do! You’re green washing one of the biggest environmental tragedies since CFCs.

It could in theory scale past where it’s at but the core team won’t let it making your argument no more useful than my unlimited coins argument. In what way exactly is it different? Yes if we pretend it’s efficient, it is. But only in our imaginations.

Even if they did increase block size fundamental inefficiencies mean even at maximum scaling it can’t hold a candle to visa or even a raspberry pi running MySQL.

[pyrale]

Not really. It means Bitcoin _currently_ scales negatively on market cap rather than transactions. Considering that bitcoin seems to be advertised primarily as a store of value and that there is little effort to push adoption for transactions, that is a very bad thing : it means that, in case of success, bitcoin performance per transaction will become worse.

In the long term, if transactions count doesn't rise fast, we will also see significant issues, either with transaction fees going to absurd amounts, effectively banning btc as a payment medium, or with the miner pool decreasing to counts where decentralization becomes inexistent.

[paulgb]

> Miners expend the same amount of energy regardless if they are validating 1 or 1000 transactions in a block.

This ignores the transaction fees. Even though they are only 10-20% of the total fees a miner collects, 10-20% of a round-trip from SF to NYC is still a lot of energy.

[rtkwe]

So essentially it only gets worse from these numbers, because right now every block is full so every transaction is consuming the least amount of energy it can if you process less transactions the energy cost just keeps going up.

Also the defense of "the energy is spent securing the blockchain" is missing the point, the blockchain isn't a good unto itself it's only useful as a log of transactions and you only need new blocks when there's transactions and if there are no transactions Bitcoin is basically dead.