[rspeele]

Well, a basic element of Bitcoin is that its energy usage per 10 minutes can be calculated roughly as:

    dollars-per-btc * btc-reward-per-block / kwh-per-dollar

The network is paying out $X every 10 minutes to miners. If miners, in aggregate, are spending more than $X some will stop because it's not profitable. If miners, in aggregate, are spending less than $X, more miners join in because there's still some easy profit to be had. Obviously, there is some friction preventing this from being a perfect match (entry cost of buying new mining hardware) but this is an approximate price target for how much money "makes sense" for the miners to spend in total.

Here on HN people seem to mostly understand that this means:

1. Higher bitcoin valuation leads directly to more spending on mining

2. Cheaper energy just leads to more energy consumed by mining for the same amount of spending

3. The amount spent on mining has no market-driven correlation to the amount "needed" for security

That seems like a pretty bad system from a technology point of view.