As models go this is ok to highlight the cost/reward incentive to mine at all, but with the original whitepaper we all already knew that full network hash rate depended on cost of electricity, the block reward, the fees of transactions in the block, and the purchasing power of bitcoin. What's new, other than an incorrect focus on "per transaction" when the real cost is system-wide and depends on different/more parameters (sum of F, difficulty rather than hash rate, and transactions per block which individually contribute arbitrary amounts including 0s to the sum of F)? It just seems like another tiresome way to make the years-old remark of "wow look how much electricity the full system (a decentralized trustless ledger) consumes and how few transactions per second it supports!"

> It just seems like another tiresome way to make the years-old remark of "wow look how much electricity the full system (a decentralized trustless ledger) consumes and how few transactions per second it supports!"

The only way it doesn't waste inordinate amounts of power and support a reasonable number of transactions is if you pretend.

It is an inordinate amount of power relatively speaking and the transaction throughput is sad (though not sad enough to get people to use other versions that make different tradeoffs, apart from the obvious one of mainstream finance with Visa, Paypal, et al.) So what?

Waste? It's evidently not waste, because miners are compensated. Missed opportunities for that energy to have done work on something else, or at least done more efficiently so the surplus could do something else? Perhaps, but that can be said of anything. I'd instead criticize the far greater missed opportunities of not coating deserts with solar panels, not peppering the world with nuclear reactors, not having satellites beaming microwaves down, etc. etc. We'll never become a Type 1 civilization with attitudes suggesting we lower global energy consumption or try to allocate it only in approved ways.

> It is an inordinate amount of power relatively speaking and the transaction throughput is sad (though not sad enough to get people to use other versions that make different tradeoffs, apart from the obvious one of mainstream finance with Visa, Paypal, et al.) So what?

Well, I mean, if you're trying to launder money or manage a ransomware product, PayPal and Visa aren't great candidates.

> Waste? It's evidently not waste, because miners are compensated.

People are compensated for all sorts of wasteful garbage. I could pay some dude to dump gasoline directly into the rain gutters. Or move a mountain 6 feet to the left using only a shovel. That doesn't instantly turn it into a productive activity.

> Missed opportunities for that energy to have done work on something else, or at least done more efficiently so the surplus could do something else? Perhaps, but that can be said of anything.

There's no massive energy surplus. If we turned off the 55TWh/yr that's being burned on multiplayer Excel, it would stop a non-trivial percentage of our greenhouse gas emissions.

> I'd instead criticize the far greater missed opportunities of not coating deserts with solar panels, not peppering the world with nuclear reactors, not having satellites beaming microwaves down, etc. etc.

Sure, I'm down. Sounds great!

> We'll never become a Type 1 civilization with attitudes suggesting we lower global energy consumption or try to allocate it only in approved ways.

Not with that attitude :)

To me, it's like there's a giant smoldering tire fire in the town square, and everyone's walking around praising the tire fire for the nice warm glow it creates.