What on earth is this logic. Bitcoin is _by design_ inefficient. Its scaling inefficiency is the principle method by which it ensures fairness. That's what PoW chain commits are. That's how they work.

Bitcoin was ALWAYS going to be inefficient. It was assumed that hardware would scale to keep up with demand, but that hasn't proven true in the advent of ad hoc mining pools.

> It was assumed that hardware would scale to keep up with demand,

No, it was designed to stay at "one block every ten minutes" regardless of the hardware added or overall hashrate of the system. Which is why you hear a lot of people arguing over block size and block compression: you always have one block every ten minutes, how many transactions can we squeeze into that block?

The only thing that adding more hashrate does is waste more power, since the network will adjust.

The power consumption is what I was alluding to. I guess I was too vague.

If commenting burned ten cents of electricity, no matter how efficient computers get, that would be a huge problem too.

Each post uses as little electricity as is feasible. Efficiency improvements lower the amount of electricity used. Reducing the use 90% would mean 90% fewer posts and ruin the posting experience.

Bitcoin doesn't try to minimize electrical use. Efficiency improvements increase the amount used. Reducing the use 90% would lower the transaction rate 0% and ruin nothing, but we can't do that because it's set up as a competition.

This is needlessly pedantic. OP is advocating for mindfulness, and lists a number of statistics for reasonable context.

The dose makes the poison.

Except Bitcoin is inefficient by design (it’s what proof of work is) and the dosage is the market cap and transaction load. So what you’re really saying is bitcoin at the scale it was meant to operate at is poison.

No, the dosage is the hash rate (if more hash rate joins, the difficulty is automatically adjusted to keep it at 1 blocks / 10 min). The transaction output is constant, and market cap is irrelevant to the energy inefficiency discussion.