re. 1 I mostly just meant that comparing it not being reversible to hashing being one-way, isn't informative about anything. It may be analogous in other ways,

re. 1 I mostly just meant that comparing it not being reversible to hashing being one-way, isn't informative about anything. It may be analogous in other ways, sure. regarding 3, I still don't think the energy use rate would be substantially changed if the target block rate had been somewhat different, so I don't see a reason to connect the energy use to the individual blocks? It seems likely to me that given a fixed issuance schedule, fixed electricity prices, etc. , that probably the energy/block is a result of the energy/time combined with the block/time , rather than the energy/time being a result of energy/block and the block/time . In terms of explanations, I think the energy/time explains energy/block, not the other way around. Reasoning: miners increase their power usage as long as the marginal expected income rate per watt is greater than the cost per watt, and the expected income rate is determined by the price that bitcoin sells at, times the expected coins mined / time. We could break the "coins mined / time" into (coins per block) * (expected number of blocks), but this is I think mainly a technicality, and doesn't particularly factor into any decision making. The power use would, theoretically, increase until no one would profit by increasing how much they spend on power for mining, and so until there is nowhere that the cost of the power of mining more is less than the average rate of income of mining. This ties the power use to the issuance rate (in coins/time,not coins/block), independent of the block rate.