And I'm telling you that the production cost is tied up in blocks, not transactions. This is not up for debate, it is intrinsic to how bitcoin works. If you send a transaction, the only power consumption involved in that act is involved in the transmission of the data and its broadcast to the network.
The monstrous energy usage comes from trying to brute force a single hash. It is entirely decoupled from transaction volume.
> production cost is tied up in blocks, not transactions
Fixed costs are amortized. The block's footprint is spread across transactions. Arguing otherwise is like someone taking the power bill of a bank to infer the cost per teller-window transaction, and the manager arguing that teller-window transactions don't burn energy, branches do. Yes, sure. But also irrelevant.
And yes, if the branch tripled in size its energy use would reduce the per-teller energy footprint. (Assuming constant transaction volume.) But that's a hypothetical.
>You can still amortize the cost of the block across its transactions
Sure, if you're more interested in talking points then useful metrics. Increasing or decreasing the block size limit would lower or increase the "cost of a transaction" (since blocks are generated on a schedule commensurate with difficulty, which is roughly a function of how many miners there are) without actually changing the amount of power consumed.
What you're doing is basically correlating the world's average temperature versus the number of pirates and declaring that pirates are responsible for global warming. In reality, the two variables are unrelated and not even correlated.
Are you really arguing that the number of blocks and the number of transactions in BitCoin are two variables that are “unrelated and not even correlated“?
> the block size limit would lower or increase the "cost of a transaction"
Assuming constant transaction volume and other factors related to difficulty. You have a point. But it's far from a panacea for proof of work, and certainly not at the threshold to derail coming taxes and regulation. (Though one might find a way to structure the taxes such that they reward a productive increase in the block size.)
But what do you amortize the fixed cost over? Refugees can use bitcoin to hold money while fleeing dangerous situations. Not being forced to do a transaction is the value in such a case.
You can't send a transaction without mining a block. Therefore all the costs that are incurred mining a block are costs that are incurred sending transactions.
Changing the maximum block size would change the "energy used by a transaction" since block production is a factor of fixed time, not transaction volume, so the comparison is absurd on its face.
It's not a comparison. The fact is that the costs of processing bitcoin transactions are predominantly fixed. This tells us that bitcoin doesn't have economies of scale. The average cost of a bitcoin transaction doesn't decrease as the number of transactions increases. This makes bitcoin uncompetitive in relation to pretty much any other transaction processing technology.
And once that block size changes, the energy used per transaction will go down. It's really very simple, stop making it complicated. Blocks are there to hold transactions - that's their whole purpose. The fact that technically you can mine an empty block is an irrelevant detail of the protocol: bitcoin would not keep getting mined if there were no more transactions.
The monstrous energy usage comes from trying to brute force a single hash. It is entirely decoupled from transaction volume.