> the energy cost of bitcoin is ongoing and depends on the volume of transactions Wait, what? That's not correct at all. The energy cost is based on the "dif

> the energy cost of bitcoin is ongoing and depends on the volume of transactions Wait, what? That's not correct at all. The energy cost is based on the "difficulty", which is derived from the moving average of the hashpower in the network. Bitcoin effectively forces the network to take a specific amount of time to mine a block irrespective of the number of mining nodes. The transaction volume has nothing to do with it.