"The average energy consumption for one single Bitcoin transaction in 2020 was 741 kilowatt-hours. This was significantly more compared to the cumulative 100,000 VISA transactions with only an energy consumption of 149 kilowatt-hours."
You can. But it is not a good metric. Assuming the difficulty adjustments ramp down you could still mine blocks with a couple of raspberry pis.
The energy consumption and capital investment in hardware is Bitcoins security model. As it would require you to put in the same amount of HW and energy to subvert the mining process. Probably we are at a point that this is almost impossible other than a state actor or a global conspiracy.
The block size increase/decrease is also tied to security. There are latency implications as well as the fact that some nodes might drop of if you increased the block size.
In both cases it comes back to security rather than the transactional throughput. I am a huge proponent but still kind of struggle with the idea of how much resources this thing sucks up.
But then again if it truly becomes the worlds ledger for wealth preservation... idk ... might be worth it.
Because that would imply linear scaling. There is a fixed energy cost that doesn't depend on the number of transactions. It goes up and down all the time.
The choice of the word “meaningfully” was deliberate . Of course you can do that. But I don’t think it is meaningful. The energy use isn’t a result of the transaction.
The miners contribute to network security (double spend protection), not transaction throughput. Common misconception.