[thesausageking]

Your facts are wrong. The global, yearly energy use of Christmas lights is ~2x Bitcoin's energy use.

People way overestimate how much energy Bitcoin uses and way underestimate how much simple things like christmas lights, video games, hockey rinks, etc. use.

[mkl95]

That means that Christmas lights are more popular than BTC. A BTC transaction consumes as much power as the average household in more than 3 weeks. If there were as many BTC users as Christmas lights users, the consequences wouldn't be pretty.

[Syonyk]

How so?

Mining rate and therefore energy costs are based on the blockchain mining parameters, not the number of users. If there were a ton more users, you'd likely see more transactions on the Lightning network, with Lightning nodes settling out on the main Bitcoin blockchain, but it wouldn't impact energy use substantially.

About the only thing that impacts energy use at this point is the price. One can reasonably estimate that, steady state, the value of the energy used is roughly equal to the total block rewards.

[thesausageking]

> If there were as many BTC users as Christmas lights users, the consequences wouldn't be pretty.

Bitcoin doesn't work that way. Energy usage doesn't scale anywhere near linear with the number of users.

Think of it this way: the Bitcoin network is buying security, not transactions, from miners.