| HN Mirror

No, not at all. Let's talk about public transportation.

If you have a public bus that seats at max 20 people, and it's continuously running on a loop, it is entirely appropriate to take the gasoline cost of running the bus for one loop, divide it by the average number of people who ride each loop, and compare that to the costs of normal transportation.

If the bus uses way more gasoline per loop than is justified by transporting 10-20 people each loop, then riding the bus is bad for the environment. It would be wild to look at that situation and say, "well, the bus is going to spend that power regardless, so actually riding it is environmentally free and the criticism doesn't make sense."

The bus exists because of the passengers, and how much work it's doing per loop and the number of passengers it's serving should factor into an analysis of whether it's worth keeping it around.

Similarly, Bitcoin's POW system exists to provide transactions, and it is entirely reasonable to take the average number of transactions it processes per block and ask whether it's good that Bitcoin spends so much energy to process so few transactions.

It's especially valid to question whether it's good that Bitcoin's energy usage can increase without increasing the number of transactions it handles. At least with a public bus, the amount of gasoline it uses doesn't start dramatically rising just because the bus became more popular, independently of how often it makes a loop or what its seat capacity is.