[betterunix]

You are pretending that miners somehow do not double their income when they double the number of mining rigs they operate. A bitcoin miner makes more money by devoting more electrical power to Bitcoin, regardless of the hashes-per-second-per-watt ratio.

[kiba]

Increasing hashing only increases the proportion you get from subsidy + fees. It's a zero-sum game. If the other guy increases his hashing rate, you will lose out. Eventually, at some point, energy cost dominates.

[betterunix]

OK, let's suppose that everyone is already at the point where consuming more power is not economical. Then a new technology that would allow everyone to use only 1/10th as much power for the same hash rate comes along. Power consumption will not decrease in that scenario; instead, it will remain the same, and the hash rate will increase.

My original point was that when a technology comes along that allows banks to be more energy efficient, the incentives are all in place for banks to adopt that technology and reduce their energy consumption. There is never an incentive for a Bitcoin miner to reduce their power consumption.