this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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Technology
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These calculations are a bit off IMO. They factor the total amount of mining and divide it by the number of transactions.
However, the amount of mining is not dependent on the amount of transactions.
I'm not a fan of bitcoin due to the wasteful proof of work mechanism but 'blaming' the transactions is not really fair IMO, especially because people don't really use bitcoin as a payment method anymore. It's just used by speculators now.
Entertain my ignorance on this for a second, but isn't there some sort of dependence here? Like not a strictly casual dependence, but if transactions were, say, to magically halve for a few days, would that not affect the mining required and thus the total energy expenditure of the mining?
(Obviously the limit case would show this to be true, in that in the absence of any transactions at all, mining would cease. But I'm after something a bit more clearly casually related, somewhat like supply and demand in the marketplace – consumption of beef driving more supply and more methane, e.g.)
@janguv
@Zworf @technology
The mining isn't based on transactions, the mining is set to target a 10 minute block time, the difficulty changes based on how much mining capacity there is.
If a block takes less than 10 minutes the difficulty goes up. If it takes more the difficulty goes down.
Each block has a maximum capacity of 2500 transactions, which is why gas is used to prioritize who gets added in a block.
There have been many blocks with zero transactions.
(May bot be correct #)
Thanks for clarifying that!