Technology

"The System" is not really that intelligent. The statement that "It will always cost a little less than one Bitcoin to mine a Bitcoin" is only correct because the incentives in the system steer everyone toward that. There's no direct link between the two. Bitcoin Miners are intently aware of how much energy they consume, and if the price of Bitcoin dips below what they are paying for electricity, they likely will shut down their rigs, because no one wants to mine at a loss.

The real issue with Bitcoin is that the algorithm used to find more Bitcoins is kind of basic in terms of its difficulty mechanism. It was the first one ever used for cryptocurrency. It was originally envisioned that owners could mine more bitcoin with spare cycles on their CPU, but since it was first designed, people have come up with custom mining chips that can mine faster and much more power efficiently. But paradoxically, this has made things worse, because the bitcoin mining difficulty simply scaled up to account for all that. So now the only way to mine Bitcoin is to have this custom hardware -- it's too hard to do any other way -- and you need so much of it that you are just as power hungry as before.

There are other algorithms that don't have these same problems. They have been designed to use other computing resources (like gobs of memory) that are much harder to concentrate on custom chips, making it much more expensive (monetarily and spatially as well as computationally) to simply spam more of them. Ethereum uses a totally different model now that doesn't rely directly on power consumption at all.

OG Bitcoiners seem to think that the massive power consumption is a net benefit, because it is spent in making the overall network more secure, and less likely to be attacked. So they will never try to change their block algorithm, even though other projects are just as secure with less power consumed. And if that opinion holds, the only way to eliminate this source of power consumption would be to crash the price, and cause the Bitcoin miners to have to mine at a huge loss to continue.

I think what needs to be considered here is what we consider a waste of electricity. Efficiency calculations are dependent on waste, So I personally think electric cars are a waste of resources, they consume electricity to run and consume non renewable resources to produce just to move a maximum of 1-5* people per journey. Whereas an electric which still uses this resources can move over 10x that amount per journey, and trains over 30x that amount per journey.

So to me that's energy inefficiency at the consumer point.

Now let's look at energy generation and transfer. At the moment, alot of energy production is a for profit business, Company A builds a solar farm, Company B builds a Coal power plant and Company C (This would be overseen by the government, not a private company) builds a nuclear reactor. All 3 of these companies produce various amounts of electricity with different efficiencies, but all must be sold at the same price. It might only cost £0.01/KwH on the solar farm to produce, but must be sold for £0.33/KwH, the coal would be £0.27/KwH and nuclear would be £0.45/KwH.

You have 3 generation methods, each with strengths and weaknesses all being forced to sell for the same price. Normally in a capitalist system you see "Competition" (not really) on the market. Company A would say "We're cheap, but can only guarantee 97% uptime due XYZ issues", most homes would be fine with me this. Company B + C "We're not as cheap but we can offer 99.9% uptime" This looks great for companies needing that security in uptime.

I've gone on a tangent and can't be bothered finishing this post maybe someone else will.