> Doesn't anyone else find it ironic that actually understanding how that blockchain works could bolster that particular anti-energy use reaction?
I'm saying make the better, more accurate, argument. I also think if people were able to independently come to those arguments, they would discover things they find interesting about blockchains in the process, as well as where to place that energy
I do not believe that expending a ton of energy every block regardless of the number of transactions on it means that it's unreasonable or inaccurate to criticize the energy usage in terms of the number of transactions that it on-average supports through that energy expenditure.
I get into this below, but pretty much any system that expends energy to perform a task can be made to act like Bitcoin and expend constant energy regardless of usage by just leaving it running all the time. Doing that doesn't get rid of the "how much energy per-transaction is Bitcoin using" question.
I guess some people have taken issue with the car analogy, so I'll use another: If I leave my shower running 24/7, does that mean that the amount of water I use divided by the number of showers I take is no longer relevant to conversations about my water usage and whether my showering system is water-efficient? No, of course those questions are still relevant, leaving the shower on constantly just makes those numbers really bad for me.
Or yet another analogy, if you're doing math on whether to keep an Amazon Prime subscription, how do you determine if the subscription is worthwhile? Typically, you would add up the number of things you order, and you might say something like, "I'm on average with my current usage paying <subscription cost>/<orders> dollars per-order for same-day delivery using Amazon Prime." And if Amazon jumped in and said, "no, that metric isn't applicable because you'll still pay the same amount with a different number of orders", we would pretty much all recognize that as a bad argument.
Bitcoin has a maximum block size. The fact that in theory people could transact more or less isn't really relevant to the cost/benefit calculation that we're doing right now. Yes, in theory Bitcoin could have max block sizes of 500mb instead of a single megabyte. But it doesn't.
So with the numbers we have now, it is reasonable to say that each Bitcoin transaction cost us 2.5 months worth of household power, even if Bitcoin would have used that power anyway. If the volume of transactions went down, the numbers would be even worse. Bitcoin is currently a system where we can collectively as a society get ~7 transactions per second at the cost of 2.5 months worth of household power for each transaction. I think that phrasing and critique is entirely accurate, and I don't think that the details of the blockchain change anything about that critique or its implications.
Particularly when Bitcoin's energy usage is often compared against much larger financial systems as a way of excusing its excesses, it is entirely appropriate to point that Bitcoin is currently much less efficient than those systems. And breaking things down and looking at the amount of energy per transaction is a reasonable way of determining the network's current efficiency.
Bitcoin is more than transactions, and it is more than onchain transactions, and it is more than its layer 2 transactions which I don't think we can quantify.
It has a much greater use as collateral. It has a much greater use as a reference value for derivatives (sometimes where it is also collateral, sometimes where it is not). As collateral several orders of magnitude more transactions occur - just onchain! And offchain, several orders of magnitude more.
I would say (even if we weren't seemingly in a debate) that none of this justifies its energy use, but only because that is a completely separate phenomenon. Barring any alternative solution for that, I lead to focusing on putting its energy use where it is most applicable and sustainable. Primarily at flare gas mining sites that don't pull from the grid.
