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Of course it depends on your understanding of what a "transaction" is. I'm referring specifically to the generally accepted understanding, which considers a tra

Of course it depends on your understanding of what a "transaction" is. I'm referring specifically to the generally accepted understanding, which considers a transaction cleared once six miners mine the block containing that transaction. 500 transactions are bundled together in a block. Mining a block is a brute force mathematical operation. The rate of mining is kept at a constant rate by the protocol, to do that the protocol must increase the complexity of mining blocks to meet the arms race of miners competing for the block reward. This means the energy required to mine those blocks is not bounded.

drdeca 6y ago
Regarding the second paragraph, yes. Well, one could say some irrelevant technicalities about the “bounded”, but otherwise, yes. Regarding the first paragraph though, I don’t think the transactions substantially contribute to the difficulty of mining the blocks. If you didn’t include as many transactions in the block, it wouldn’t make it substantially less costly to mine?
- omegaworks 6y ago
  My concern is the energy cost of running the network. We can discuss that cost in terms of how much energy is used to confirm each transaction by dividing the energy cost of mining six blocks by the number of transactions in a block. Letting us communicate in terms of the energy cost to confirm a transaction allows us to compare the efficiency of Bitcoin to other payment systems. You're right: the number of transactions in each block is not relevant to the amount of energy is used to mine that block. The network could decide to include more transactions in a block. Some Bitcoin forks tried doing exactly that, actually. Right now it's 500, but if enough miners agree tomorrow it could be 1000. All it does is change the number in the denominator of the energy cost per transaction calculation, but it won't change the fundamental incentive structure of the network.

drdeca 6y ago

Regarding the second paragraph, yes. Well, one could say some irrelevant technicalities about the “bounded”, but otherwise, yes. Regarding the first paragraph though, I don’t think the transactions substantially contribute to the difficulty of mining the blocks. If you didn’t include as many transactions in the block, it wouldn’t make it substantially less costly to mine?

omegaworks 6y ago
My concern is the energy cost of running the network. We can discuss that cost in terms of how much energy is used to confirm each transaction by dividing the energy cost of mining six blocks by the number of transactions in a block. Letting us communicate in terms of the energy cost to confirm a transaction allows us to compare the efficiency of Bitcoin to other payment systems. You're right: the number of transactions in each block is not relevant to the amount of energy is used to mine that block. The network could decide to include more transactions in a block. Some Bitcoin forks tried doing exactly that, actually. Right now it's 500, but if enough miners agree tomorrow it could be 1000. All it does is change the number in the denominator of the energy cost per transaction calculation, but it won't change the fundamental incentive structure of the network.