Bitcoin transactions take negligible energy to produce and validate. It's block production that's energy-intensive, and it's the same regardless of how big or full blocks are.
Like any energy-intensive industry that could operate profitably via fossil fuel consumption, mining should be regulated to only use green energy. No different than power production and consumption today.
You can't regulate Bitcoin mining. Bitcoin is not controllable in the same way as say, rare earth metal mining, where you can exert pressure on whoever is mining them (or whichever nation is exporting them). There's very little any government can do to pressure a mining farm in Far East Russia or Northern China to use green power for their operations.
You can do Bitcoin mining almost completely offline. Once that magical hash that satisfies the proof-of-work requirement appears, there's no tracing to where it was produced.
That’s why a generic carbon tax should be used. There is no point punishing Bitcoin mining because bitcoin mining isn’t inherently bad, it’s the burning of fuels that is bad.
Countries should then tax imports from other countries that do not have a carbon tax.
It's pretty hard to hide the fossil fuel-burning power plant generating your PoW. If your local government or citizens won't stop you from polluting the environment, other governments can impose retaliatory tariffs or even sanctions on your government, and citizens of other countries can boycott your country's goods and services. Make the financial penalties for tolerating fossil fuel-burning PoW steep enough, and your power plant gets shut down.
Shutting down exchanges that deal in bitcoin would nicely eliminate bitcoin. Nobody is going to mine an unprofitable coin they can't sell, and except for a tiny number of black market sellers, nobody wants to deal in BTC itself.
But the block size is limited - in effect limiting transactions per block. The difficultly of mining a block increases over time -> energy consumption of mining a block increases over time (assuming stationary hardware)
Right -- miners are selling you block space in which to store your transactions. That's the thing everyone's buying with Bitcoin, and that's the thing miners are spending all their energy on -- putting your transactions into blocks. The transactions themselves are very cheap to produce and validate.
Here's a real-world example: I sign and give you a transaction that, if you relay within the next 1000 blocks, will give you some BTC. You can choose relay it, to let it expire, or to resell it to someone else by signing another transaction that consumes my transaction's UTXO to you and grants up to the same amount to your buyer.
Does that actually happen, anywhere? How would you record the "sale" of the transaction if not on the blockchain? (If the answer is some other currency/financial system, consider what that implies for the overall utility of btc)
Bitcoin is presently estimated to consume ~10GW of power[1]. Transaction rate has climbed to & stabilized ~4 transactions/second[2] (it peaked for a day above 5 tps during the frenzy 3 years ago). Running 10GW for 1/4 a second comes to 695 kWh. One could drive a Tesla up and a good part of the way down either American coast with this much energy.
"Negligible energy" to produce a transaction is not correct. Miners are willing to sell transactions that cost enormous heaps of money to mint because the coin itself "has value".
Meanwhile, my ancient laptop can generate and validate many thousands of transactions per second, using just 10s of watts. In fact, the negligible cost to validate transactions is exactly what allows you to run a node at home, on a humble Raspberry Pi.
Miners don't sell transactions. They sell block space in which to store them. That, fundamentally, is simultaneously what makes Bitcoin so expensive, and so valuable -- people wanting to get their transactions confirmed.
Maybe its fee is too low now but some miner will add it to a block later when the fee becomes reasonable again, win the mining lottery and add it to the blockchain. Maybe next year or never.
Bitcoin transactions take negligible energy to produce and validate. It's block production that's energy-intensive, and it's the same regardless of how big or full blocks are.
Like any energy-intensive industry that could operate profitably via fossil fuel consumption, mining should be regulated to only use green energy. No different than power production and consumption today.