dgmib , 1 month ago

The economics of Bitcoin mining at scale force it to find an equilibrium where the cost of mining a Bitcoin is just a bit less than the current market value of a Bitcoin.

Electricity is the only significant variable cost at scale so the amount of electricity needed to mine a bitcoin ends up being a little less than however much a bitcoin can buy.

Thus one can estimate the total amount of electricity very accurately by simply taking the block rate (6/hr) times the block reward (~6.25 BTC) times the current price of a bitcoin divided by the wholesale price of electricity. You’ll get the upper bound for the amount of electricity being consumed.

Which by the way works out to around a TWh costing tens of millions of USD every single day. Which is more electricity than a small country

The only thing that will stop the waste is if the price of bitcoin drops. You can legislate it away, that won’t stop it, it will just move when it’s happening.