Digiconomist

Huh? It's all in the infographic. 60% is the target, but "production takes time" (see content here) hence the "ultimately". I'm not hiding the current number, it's in the key statistics.

If you're interested in where the 60% comes from in the first place > it's based on the lifetime costs of a number of machines. It was on the page a while ago, but the index page itself isn't a research paper so I removed it. I'll give it a new spot soon, probably on this page (already containing the foundation of the method):

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-electricity-consumption

If you just want to see some real-world numbers, check out my break-down a farm recently:

https://twitter.com/digieconomist/status/898582265080446976

(Note: subtle difference between part spent on elec & part spent on ongoing costs. I take costs and then 1 kWh for every 5 cents spent, so including overhead.)

Ah no, it's 5.58 for the current 22%. If it actually gets to 60% it would be much worse.

I hope we're not building hydro power plants for the sole purpose of supporting the Bitcoin network. The energy may be "clean", but these projects have their own impact on the surrounding ecosystem.

"Wasting" energy is required to make PoW work, but if we could achieve the same with PoS (and that seems to be the case since ETH is switching too) then it would really be a waste.

Just want to note that 60% is the expected future (ultimately), but the current % is more like 22 (found by taking the total cost # divided by the total annualized mining revenue #).

The comparison to VISA is a common one. Whether it makes sense to use BTC in a certain way ultimately depends on the user and how they're using it. But honestly, as a medium of exchange Bitcoin simply doesn't make sense in most cases.

So, the block reward is indeed increasing, but two other things are increasing very fast. First is the price per Bitcoin, and second is the number of fees per block. Just the day before yesterday miners received 1800 coins from mining and an additional 500 from fees. That's already over 20% of the total daily reward. This two things are more than compensating the loss of block rewards (in BTC terms). Things aren't expected to improve based on this.

It's kind of insane if you compare to other payment services (if that's how you use BTC). Not only do you pay $5-$10 per transactions, but that transaction also consumes 20,000-30,000 times more energy.