1. Wind/solar energy are being trumpeted around the world as the cheapest source of electricity available. 2. Bitcoin miners' profits are directly `sale price of BTC - buy price of electricity`. Other costs are marginal in comparison. 3. BTC mining is a extremely competitive, trivially mobile, trivially liquid, global market. 4. Given 1, 2 & 3 there is a lot of fretting that BTC is creating a coal-powered financial system.

With the recent spike, the currently reasonable cost for a fast, median-sized transaction is $10.46 [1] [2] According to the fretting articles I read, that is enough to power an average home for a 23 days and motivates sending over 300kg (700lb) of C02 into the air [3] That's 35 gallons of gasoline at 20lb CO2/gallon.

:/

For what it's worth, I get the concern. But, I also see equal shares of BTC hate|BTC fanboyism everywhere I go. Latching on to the environmental concerns of BTC is trendy right now. It's hard to argue against without sounding like an asshole and it's not entirely false. But, it's not entirely honest either. Everything I read and calculate shows that BTC makes total sense as a defacto green energy subsidy. But, that does not spark outrage. So, instead there is a lot of fretting about the second rise of a coal-powered economy.

IMHO, the way Ethereum is going is great: Bootstrap with POW then switch to POS after enough investment is built-up that staking actually means something. It's arguable that the best use of BTC at this point is to burn them all to bootstrap more POS tokens. We just need alternatives that inspire enough confidence to motivate people to convert their BTC over.

[1] https://awebanalysis.com/en/convert-satoshi-to-dollar-usd/ [2] https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ [3] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/