> Blocks can be completely full or utterly empty and still use the amount of power.
It has been steady around 1500 tx/block for years.
> You're also missing the point of the power consumption. Its not used to move capital from one person to another, its used to secure the network from attacks and preserve its integrity.
I'm not. That's a completely insane amount of money to pay for that service. It's totally unnecessary.
> Stats like the one you quoted don't take into account the number of Lightning network transactions happening off-chain but is secured by a past on-chain transaction.
They don't have to. All those techniques are equally applicable to POW, but POW doesn't spend $18 million daily on electricity to do it.
> Secondly, if oil and gas companies could profitably monetize flared methane, they would have already.
Oil and gas companies sell oil and gas, not electricity. Bitcoin miners are not running methane gas turbines. Electricity companies are.
>>It has been steady around 1500 tx/block for years.
>>That's a completely insane amount of money to pay for that service. It's totally unnecessary.
You cant know exactly how many transactions are processed per bitcoin block. The introduction of the lightning network and other 2nd layers mean any one of the ~1500txs per block could in reality be a batch of a 1,000,000 or more transactions being settled. There could easily be 15,000,000,000,000,000 txs per block, think about what that does to any $/tx calculation.
Bitcoin is cheaper than visa because it is designed to process infinite transactions for a fixed security cost.
It has been steady around 1500 tx/block for years.
> You're also missing the point of the power consumption. Its not used to move capital from one person to another, its used to secure the network from attacks and preserve its integrity.
I'm not. That's a completely insane amount of money to pay for that service. It's totally unnecessary.
> Stats like the one you quoted don't take into account the number of Lightning network transactions happening off-chain but is secured by a past on-chain transaction.
They don't have to. All those techniques are equally applicable to POW, but POW doesn't spend $18 million daily on electricity to do it.
> Secondly, if oil and gas companies could profitably monetize flared methane, they would have already.
Oil and gas companies sell oil and gas, not electricity. Bitcoin miners are not running methane gas turbines. Electricity companies are.