[Cryptography] One Bitcoin Transaction Now Uses as Much Energy as Your House in a Week

[Benjamin Kreuter]

On Tue, 2017-11-14 at 15:46 -0500, Sam Generic wrote:
> Bitcoin scales to the lowest marginal cost of energy in the world. If
> you
> believe that it burns too much energy, you ought to be advocating for
> high
> taxes on bitcoin mining. If the price of burning bitcoins is 9 cents
> instead of 3, then Bitcoin will require 3x less energy for the same
> security

...because someone trying to attack a payment system will definitely
pay their taxes, and under no circumstances would they be willing to
spend 3x the money on completing their attack.

Really, at best, the security of Bitcoin scales with the energy spent
on defense, which must always exceed the energy spent attacking the
system.  Reduce the energy spent on mining by a factor of 3, and your
security margin has been reduced by a factor of 3.

-- Ben