[freebeard]

Originally Posted by myself

When Bitcoin reaches $10K, a single Satoshi will be worth one dime. So much for micropayments. Transaction costs are going up.

Said I myself a month ago. Steam no longer accept Bitcoin as the transaction fees are prohibative. As of posting 1BTC=US$15760.9.

arstechnica.com:Bitcoin’s insane energy consumption, explained

subheads
The Bitcoin network consumes massive amounts of energy
Bitcoin’s energy use should decline in the long run*
Can we reduce Bitcoin’s energy use?

*There's a widespread misconception that Bitcoin mining is based on a mathematical process that gets steadily harder as more and more bitcoins are produced.

That's wrong. The Bitcoin network is designed to automatically adjust the difficulty of mining to ensure that one block is produced every 10 minutes, no matter how much (or how little) computing power there is on the network.

When Bitcoin launched in 2009, each block came with a 50-bitcoin reward for the miner who created it. This figure is scheduled to fall by half every four years. It fell to 25 bitcoins in 2012 and 12.5 bitcoins in 2016. The reward will fall again to 6.25 bitcoins in 2020. When the mining industry's revenue falls by half, its energy consumption should fall by the same proportion, since, if it didn't fall, mining would become an unprofitable activity.

The reward halves again in 2024, in 2028, and every four years after that. So, if the price of bitcoins stabilizes, the Bitcoin network's energy consumption will steadily fall over the coming decades.

Another important point: that fixed 12.5 bitcoin reward doesn't depend on the number of transactions the Bitcoin network processes. Miners do also collect per-transaction fees from Bitcoin users, but those are currently much smaller than the fixed per-block reward.

This means that the Bitcoin network could easily be upgraded to handle more transactions—potentially a lot more—without significantly changing miner revenues or energy consumption. So it's not the case that a growing Bitcoin network will necessarily lead to a growing environmental disaster.