The energy costs of a block are not in relation with the amount of transactions in it. Just because you have two numbers, doesn‘t mean you should divide them.

Short rant:

The current settlement system is layers up on layers of legacy systems. How do international settlements exactly work? How long do they take? Where does money come from? Why should flawed metrics and corruptable humans decide when to issue currency?

Bitcoin follows a simple set of rules that everyone can understand in days of intense learning. An average developer can audit the code and can verify these rules. It‘s a simple and beautiful system that HN just loves to hate, for whatever reason.

> The energy costs of a block are not in relation with the amount of transactions in it. Just because you have two numbers, doesn‘t mean you should divide them.

Right, they are unrelated. The energy costs are driven by how much Bitcoin is valued, so the more Bitcoin succeeds, the higher the energy costs go. The transaction rate does not increase, it stays around 400K/day, enough for everybody in Russia to make one transaction a year. Or for another example, for every business in the US to make 5 transactions a year. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

The solution to Bitcoin's extremely low capacity for transactions is for it to be only actually traded on-chain by the largest institutions, like gold moving between vaults in the old days of metal-backed currencies. But in that world, most companies and certainly most individuals would trade using layers upon layers of complex systems built on top of Bitcoin, not Bitcoin itself. Very likely those layers will involve some form of centralization. So what's the point of all this elegance?

Also I might add that the probability that the layers that people will use will be open source is very high. This inherently makes it more accessible to everyone.

If we look at the Lightning Network (a 2nd layer solution), there are 3 mainstream solutions, all open source.

On top of that you can have something like chaumian ecash, which is even more privacy preserving and cheaper.

Yes, we will need layers on top of Bitcoin, but thats a good thing. The base layer needs to be expensive (small blocks) in order to keep the cost of running a node as low as it is now (<$100)

Because the base layer can be audited and not meddled with by third parties.

Everyone can build their own layers on top. There is no permission needed.

It's the peoples money.

> The amount of electricity consumed every year by always-on but inactive home devices in the USA alone could power the Bitcoin network for 1.7 years

I don't know about you, but I see people escaping tyranny in monetary policy as less wasteful than US standby devices.

Exactly!

Isn’t it awesome how secure the network is!

It's awesome, but it should get even more awesome as BTC gains mainstream acceptance. The energy usage should hopefully one day match that of the USA or at least India to be even more secure.

After all, if Bitcoin is going to become the global reserve currency a 51% attack should be absolutely impossible. Right now all the mining being done is rewarded with a measly ~$55 million per day. That's within the reach of some rich individuals to outspend, to say nothing of big businesses, hedge funds, or even nation states. I think spending about $1B a day on mining would be more appropriate in the long run.

Even at the current state you wouldn't be able to source all the asics needed for a 51% attack.

Why buy them yourself? Just pay the people who already have them to find hashes for you. Pay noticeably better than the existing pools and they would line up at your door.

Miners are motivated by profit. They won't necessarily even know that you're trying to do a 51%, just that you're buying hashrate and are willing to pay them more than they're getting elsewhere.

edit: In fact, you could run a legitimate mining pool at a small loss for a while to build trust. Participating in your loss leader mining pool would be attractive to miners since the other pools, that skim some profit for themselves to support their operations, can't compete on price with one willing to lose a little bit of money. If you want, break it out into 3 "different" pools that you control so that it even looks to the naive like there's no 51% control. Then spring your trap.

51%ing Bitcoin is well within the resources of a motivated hedge fund, major corporation, or country. The motivation just isn't there right now.

The motivation is extremely simple, as you can just short bitcoin, do your stunt and then cash in the rewards as you just crashed bitcoin.

However the game theory behind what you are saying is completely nonsense, which is why no one ever did nor will do your technically and economically impossible stunt.