Electricity per transaction is an extremely poor way to communicate anything useful. It says nothing about the actual harm of Bitcoin and only leaves readers (and bloggers) drawing their own conclusions.
why is it a poor way to communicate anything useful?
if sending someone a dollar through venmo costs $0.0000001 worth of electricity and sending someone a dollar through the bitcoin network costs $1 doesn't that communicate everything you need to know?
Probably because twice the amount of transactions do require as much energy as half of the amount of transactions or as much energy as no transactions at all, i.e. Bitcoin's energy usage depends on the difficulty of mining a block which is not affected by the number of transactions in a block.
> i.e. Bitcoin's energy usage depends on the difficulty of mining a block which is not affected by the number of transactions in a block.
Only if the transactions do not have any fee. If they have a transaction fee, this indirectly increases the difficulty of mining future blocks (since the miners get more Bitcoin per block, they can use more energy per block before their expected net return is negative, and they are incentivized to do so through competition with other miners; the Bitcoin difficulty adjustment then notices the increase in hash rate and increases the difficulty).
In your example, you are giving concrete numbers. Concrete numbers are extremely useful. If you make a comparison without concrete numbers, it can often be misleading. It goes without saying that concrete numbers can be misleading on their own. It can be quite difficult to nail down rules for honest communication.
There are a lot of terrible things that we use or were using. I don't want to sound mean, but Windows 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 were not that great. Not to mention Windows Millennium Edition.
Think of all that electricity wasted because people could not get their work done, they had to stay longer in the office wasting water, electricity, getting frustrated, etc.
And that's all because Bill's mom was working in IBM management.
But, how to estimate the waste of traditional currency? US dollar is based on Capitalism and the weapons. Should we count the price to maintain these two factors? Capitalism is almost built on the balance of wasting resource and incoming. Should we count the waste in market? Developed countries keep QE to spread the debt into global market. Should we count the side effect of QE? As citizen of developed countries, we take the benefits of traditional money and we control it. It is good for us as government or corporation, but may not be good for individual.
And he's right. Bitcoin is terrible for the planet and our future.