> I have no idea about how these planned future improvements work. they already work. every on-chain bitcoin settlement can represent trillions of BTC exchange

> I have no idea about how these planned future improvements work. they already work. every on-chain bitcoin settlement can represent trillions of BTC exchanges. same as interbank settlements - done once a day, represent millions or billions of individual transactions. what does that do to your energy / tx metric? > but today transferring Bitcoin (the main action that users of the network are supposed to perform) consumes a lot of energy. transferring doesn't, securing it against an attack does. > operations themselves consume nothing but rather use the value of energy as ingredient that ends up inside the block as stored value that's exactly right, people that choose transacting on bitcoin chain do so knowing that they pay for certain level of security and you can see it from the correlation between bitcoin price and bitcoin hashrate. it's a system with many feedback loops that self-balances at a level of security that is demanded by the market. you may think it's backward opinion but i appreciate that you recognize i'm not arguing in bad faith.