[dheera]

Thought question here. What if we hyped up bitcoin to 10X its current value? Wouldn't that mean that per real-world transaction / per unit dollar value it would use 1/10th of its current amount of energy? For example something that would normally cost 0.1 BTC would now cost 0.01 BTC.

[aaronax]

The block rewards issued to miners would be worth 10x as much, so more equipment would be pressed into use for mining, until the expenses of mining roughly equal the current value of the block rewards (plus transaction fees, for the nit pickers out there).

10x price increase equals 10x mining expenditure, mostly on energy.

[kybernetikos]

No actually, as bitcoins value increases there's more incentive to mine it, as more miners come online the power usage shoots up.