| You don't need detailed research because a little back-of-the-napkin math shows that it's way too much. A comparison I found recently is that Bitcoin uses 10x as much electricity as Google. Why is this? Well, you can think of Bitcoin as giving away prize money to miners who win a contest. Currently they are giving away over $50 million in Bitcoin every day. [1] The electricity spend by miners is capped by the amount of prize money. Why so much? It wasn't planned. The bug in Bitcoin's algorithm is that energy usage is proportional to market price, and the amount it went up wasn't anticipated. If Bitcoin crashed to a tenth of its current market value, it would be about even with Google. That's still way too much for what it does. Maybe it should crash to 1% its current price, to be reasonable? Besides a market crash, the other way to fix it would be speeding up the schedule for lowering miner awards. It's going to drop in half this month, but there's no principled reason to wait another four years for the reward to drop in half again. But good luck getting consensus for that. More revenue is better than less revenue and miners don't want the prize money to drop. Another comparison: Musk sponsored a $100 million X Prize for inventing carbon capture technology. That's a very big prize for an important cause, and it's only 2 days of Bitcoin prize money. The Bitcoin prizes are too damn high. [1] https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_miners_revenue_per_da...
[2] https://www.xprize.org/prizes/elonmusk |
That doesn't really fix it, because transaction fees will start to dominate the block subsidy within 4 halvings or so.