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Bitcoin “transactions” only appear to cost so much if you divide total energy usage by transactions. This is very silly, because it gives the impression that more transactions would lead to something like a linearly higher energy cost, which is not true; the energy cost is due to mining, and transaction validation comes along for the ride. You could try to figure out how to allocate the energy per transaction but only after you somehow set aside the energy required strictly for mining.

Another way of framing this is that for a system with a relatively low transaction volume, i.e. a small denominator, your “cost per transaction” is always going to look ridiculous.

All of that being said — I wish he had picked Ethereum instead.



You can’t have transactions without mining though and the block size is limited, so there’s an upper limit to how many transactions can go through in one block.


Details:

> Blocks size in blockchain is limited to 1MB. Miners can mine blocks up to the 1MB fixed limit, but any block larger than 1MB is invalid. This limit cannot be modified without a hard fork.

https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy


Not exactly true anymore, it's 1MB "virtual", yeah, but segregated witness bytes are worth 0.75 other bytes, so the actual value can go over.




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