Once somebody talks about how much energy Bitcoin uses, Bitcoin users or fans tend to reply with a flock of arguments ranging from: 75% of the energy is clean, the banking system and gold consume more energy...
It is the wrong approach, my friends, because it is conceding to their bogus and false numbers.
The articles that were published in the media about Bitcoin energy consumption were so so wrong in understanding how Bitcoin works, that I don't understand how this has become the basis for this debate.
The articles in question made the extrapolation that "if Bitcoin currently consumes X energy that is X per transaction so to do 100 times that amount of transactions it will consume 100 times the amount of energy".
And this is what most people think. When Tesla says they stop accepting Bitcoin they are doing the same assumption.
Guess what, an empty block consumes the same energy that a block with 3.000 transactions. Miners secure the network and the hashes they do are a "redundancy" that keeps the system from bad actors spamming the network with false blocks. Transactions could double or could halve with the same current hash rate.
Hash rate could fall 10 times and we would still be able to do the same number of transactions.
Energy consumption has nothing to do with the number of transactions because processing transactions is not what consumes the amounts of energy but trying to solve the POW algorithm that keeps the network secure.
Most boomers and people who don't care to learn about Bitcoin think that miners process transactions and that each transaction costs hashes to process and that is where the energy consumption comes from, and thus scales linearly. But that's not true, absolutely not.
So tl;dr I don't get why we don't simply point to the fact that those estimates of energy consumption were bogus and done by somebody who doesn't even understand the basics of how Bitcoin works!!!
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