The energy usage of Bitcoin or similar projects like Ethereum are derived from the “mining” aspect which is not connected to transactions or transaction volume.

The energy usage of Bitcoin or similar projects like Ethereum are derived from the “mining” aspect which is not connected to transactions or transaction volume. For example, early Bitcoin was generally, for purposes of discussion, about the same transaction throughput as we have today. But there were very few miners, so the energy costs were very low. Was Bitcoin truly many orders of magnitude more efficient back then? No. It’s simply that there are many many more miners competing for rewards, because Bitcoin is valuable. There’s an energy lottery built into the Bitcoin protocol that emits new currency. This lottery is directly related to the security of the network but not the number of transactions or usage. Unfortunately it’s hard to find an exact parallel but something like the military protection of the dollar would be a more valid comparison than Visa’s transaction volume. Consider this: even if the blocks were empty, which means no transactions, the energy usage would be the same.