Because increasing the number of transactions does not significantly change energy cost.

Bitcoin's daily energy cost will asymptotically approach (price per coin)*(daily miner reward amount).

As block reward decreases, we may see less energy investment in the future.

There is a loose link between number of transactions and price (network effect of more people using Bitcoin increases perceived value), but its probably a fairly small correlation.

Why measure it in energy/transaction? The energy is not used for transactions, but for securing the ledger. With second-layer scaling solutions you will have no limit of transactions per block.

Why bother with a second layer when new blockchain designs improve upon the designs of Bitcoin? The ledger is "secured" by about 6 mining pools which might even be controlled by the same people.

Second layer goes completely against Satoshi's primary design in the first sentence of the white paper - which is removing the need for third parties. The lightening network design is a siphoning power grab by Blockstream.

After all, if you look at Bitcoin from a technical perspective the services Bitcoin offers are available in Litecoin, Monoero, etc.

>Why bother with a second layer when new blockchain designs improve upon the designs of Bitcoin?

We can argue about how to scale layer one, but layer two always provides scalability benefits that layer one can't provide. So choose your favorite layer one scaling scheme and then use layer two on top of that.

>Second layer goes completely against Satoshi's primary design in the first sentence of the white paper - which is removing the need for third parties.

Satoshi in the whitepaper proposed SPV nodes which introduce semi-trusted third parties for the sake of scalability.

Layer two does not introduce trusted third parties. It, under certain conditions, is less censorship resistant that layer one, but that is why you want a scalable layer one as well so that transactions which need censorship resistance can fall back to layer one. There is no reason to bloat layer one with transactions that layer two can handle. Layer two helps layer one scale.

>The lightening network design is a siphoning power grab by Blockstream.

Even if this is true, and I very strongly doubt it, that shouldn't influence your view on the technology. Either it works or it doesn't.

Payment channels and LN don't introduce trusted 3rd parties or counterparty risk.

Payment channels weren't discussed in the whitepaper, but Satoshi discussed and attempted some payment channel designs[1]. He left before coming up with a secure payment channel design. Recent improvements to Bitcoin, including the transaction malleability fix included in the recent segwit upgrade a few months ago, finally make secure payment channels feasible.

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Payment_channels#Nakamoto_high-fr...

> The lightening network design is a siphoning power grab by Blockstream.

Please stop lying.

Do you think it costs less energy to produce and maintain a fiat currency + supporting systems?

Please don't fight what you perceive to be ideological boilerplate with your own—that's not what this site is here for at all. Would you please, instead, read the guidelines and then start commenting civilly and substantively?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

To me it seems that you make the mistake of buying into the old dichotomy of 'left' vs. 'right'.

This leads you to believe that every lefty is a communist, rejects 'sound money' and supports a strong centralized government. But that's not the whole picture. I consider myself to be an anarcho syndicalist - which is pretty lefty - and I don't have a problem with Bitcoin. Quite the contrary; I support the replacement of centralized hierarchical structures by distributed democratic structures. Be it financial, political or societal.

'The left' is much more diverse than you might think. Don't let yourself be fooled into thinking that there's only 'left' vs. 'right'.

So, may I suggest that the dislike of decentralized systems correlates more with a preference for authoritarian systems?

Anyway; about the rest of your post:

> [...] like bombing brown people [...]

I think this is uncalled for. It's a strawman deflection and not a very good one at that. Warmongering has been a favorite past time of all sorts of governments, not only leftist ones.

> It's a rejection of science to do so.

How so?

> But this kind of false claim, that is repeated over and over and over again is just not acceptable.

> [...] most bitcoin is mined by renewable excess energy [...]

Do you have any pointers to refute the claim? Can you give me a link to some numbers?

Looking forward to hear from you!

> > [...] most bitcoin is mined by renewable excess energy

>Do you have any pointers to refute the claim? Can you give me a link to some numbers?

The largest cost of cryptocurrency mining is electricity. Electricity energy is the cheapest so naturally many Bitcoin mining operations are built in places that are over producing energy. The cheapest excess power tends to be hydro power, Bitcoin can be viewed as a small subsidy for new hydro electric projects when demand has not caught up to supply.

>Bitcoin mining operations – essentially massive and powerful datacenters - are located internationally, and usually concentrated where the cost of electricity is cheapest. That’s because the cost of electricity can make up 90-95% of total ongoing mining costs. These datacenter mines can be found in numerous countries, from the Republic of Georgia to Iceland, to Malaysia and Venezuela. The largest share of the miners are located in China, close to the border with Tibet where cheap hydropower is relatively abundant. - https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterdetwiler/2016/07/21/mining...

>Haobtc is also operating hydropower mining facilities in Kangding. Eric Mu, Chief Marketing Officer at Haibtc, said it cost a lot to build a hydroelectric plant, but later on it does not have a lot of maintenance costs and can use electricity cheaply. -https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@jycloud9/china-builds-a-hydropo...

Bitcoin miners move to places with very cheap/near free power. They can park the datacenter right next to the power plant so very little is lost in transmission.

> I support the replacement of centralized hierarchical structures by distributed democratic structures

is bitcoin democratic? Isn't a "might makes right" system?

Why is their claim nonsensical? Just do the math, politics and countries are not relevant. Take the hash rate, transactions per second, and power consumption of any mining rig. The current hash rate is about 11 ExaH/s (; 11 Million TH/s) supporting approximately 3.81 transactions per second. Meaning power to support about 3 ExaH is used, for every transaction. Taking a decent mining GPU youre at about 3MH/J.

To perform this amount of hashing with this example it would take 3TJ. Or for comparison, the energy in about 170 barrels of oil, for one Bitcoin transaction.

The numbers may be a bit off, but they're not off by a factor 100, and my house for sure doesn't even need 1/100th of this to run a day.

Reject a claim because you don’t like the source. Assert that the initial claim is a rejection of science. But instead of refuting the numbers with your own, you launch into an emotional attack about “the left” bombing brown people and people from developing nations having no access to money.

This is not how to defend bitcoin.