[RamshackleJ]

nope, transactions clear at a rate unrelated to mining(so long as at least 1 person is mining).

The only thing that impacts transaction costs is how many other people are trying to clear their own transactions and bidding up the sat/vbyte rate.

[IfOnlyYouKnew]

Either transaction costs go up, or electricity usage per transaction goes down. Anything else just doesn’t add up.

[arcticbull]

Most coiners conveniently ignore block reward when calculating the cost of a transaction - that's your missing factor. Consider that the only reason you need to secure the blockchain is because it is mutable, if it were immutable it would be sufficient to simply publish it with a known hash. Ergo, 100% of the energy consumption of the Bitcoin network is attributable to transaction processing and therefore can be quantized into and proportionally assigned to transactions.

  TotalCost = DirectCost + ProportionalAllocationOfBlockReward

The value of the block reward is proportional to the price of bitcoin, and this block reward determines the ceiling of the consumption of resources in mining. The floor is determined by prisoners dilemma and so likely approaches the ceiling at the limit.

So yes, the transaction cost does scale with consumption of resources, albeit in a tail-wagging-the-dog kind of way, because the price of the block reward changes with price allowing more resources to be consumed.

Currently the actual cost of a Bitcoin transaction is $2.44 in direct costs + (6.25 * 41000)/2750 = $93 in indirect costs, so right around $95.44 - and that's using I believe the maximum possible transactions per block, the reality is it's more expensive still.

Move over Bank of America, there's a new king in town.

[mikeblackson]

You can do 1+ million lightning network transactions that will settle as 1 transaction on the BTC blockchain, so ~$93/1,000,000? Sounds amazingly cheap for uncensorable transactions.

ESG people are trying to solve something that is already solved. POW is here to stay and will scale tremendously well as we all move to layer 2.

[arcticbull]

As I mentioned upthread I can't possibly disagree more. PoW is designed specifically not to scale. The higher the price the more it wastes. It's an embarrassingly poor technology.

You completely synthesized $93/1000000 obviously, and as we discussed it would take 75 years to open a channel for everyone alive today and $300,000,000,000.

[andruby]

Sorry, that's not how it works. The network adapts the difficulty to target 1 new block every 10 minutes.

More mining → higher difficulty → higher electricity usage per block.

The transaction costs paid are independent of difficulty or number of miners. Transaction cost depends on the demand. A block has a limited size in bytes. If more people want to send transactions than there is room in the current block, the miner that mines that block will include the transactions that include the highest fee.

When sending a transaction, you can choose that fee. Higher fee → higher chance of being included. Bitcoin clients will usually calculate a reasonable fee for you, based on the demand.

[vel0city]

Miners don't set the transaction cost, they can only maximize fee revenue by picking the highest fee transactions at that time in the mempool. So, if it becomes unprofitable or not profitable enough for the taste of the miner, hashrate will go down, which will lead to a difficulty adjustment, which means overall electricity usage per transaction goes down.

So its scenario #2 in your comment.