[arebop]

No, the energy usage is proportional to its economic value. If energy prices go up or down while nothing else changes, bitcoin's energy usage will go inversely. If bitcoin's value goes up or down while nothing else changes, energy usage will go the same.

[nfin]

you missed the elephant in the room:

bitcoin can almost double (2x) in value every 4 years without an increase of energy usage by miners (if you put a wide enough filter)

- I guess most understand that the reason is the supply halving finding place every 210.000 blocks (roughly 4 years), and nothing to do with technology/moore's law or anything else

- this will probably be true (more or less... lets say 1.8x -2x) for another 2 halvings

- then the rate [1] will decrease from about 2x to 1x while fees rapidly start to be the predominant source of revenue to miners, and less and less the newly minted coins)

[1]: rate of possible increase in value for the same amount of energy consumed

[wmf]

That's not good enough. Even a $10T market cap doesn't justify 6 GW of power consumption when PoS would consume effectively zero.

[kinghajj]

PoW uses energy consumption for security. PoS uses staking for security. Every analysis I've seen agrees that PoW is more secure than PoS, precisely because of the energy requirements. Those who favor PoS argue that it's still secure "enough"; those who favor PoW disagree and prefer the increased security it brings.

[nfin]

Here something to read for those really interested in knowing both sides of the argument (PoW side in this case, as the potential benefits of PoS are clear to everyone):

https://medium.com/coinmonks/blockchain-myth-5-proof-of-work...

https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/

https://medium.com/coinmonks/proof-of-work-vs-proof-of-stake...

That's a bit to read, but not a topic that one should just think he knows about (and these articles have quite a lot of overlap)