I agree with pretty much everything you said about the costs and rewards of mining and where the pressure points are. What I don't agree with is the simple stat

I agree with pretty much everything you said about the costs and rewards of mining and where the pressure points are. What I don't agree with is the simple statement: > if the mining reward is cut in half, the electricity consumption of the network is cut in half This would only happen if half of the miners shut off their equipment as soon as the reward adjustment occurred, which does not happen [1]. Even then, that doesn't change the electricity consumed by a single miner producing a single block, since that is governed by the difficulty parameter, which also did not halve and took multiple weeks to bottom out before increasing again [2]. There is no simple function between block reward and network or block electricity consumption. 1. There was a drop of 120PH/s to 90PH/s within a week after the halvening. https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate 2. You can see a similar curve of difficulty _following_ the hash rate of network, albeit over multiple weeks. https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/bitcoin/difficulty-chart https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/bitcoin/difficulty-chart