From the article, emphasis my own: > So, at any given time, there are millions of bitcoin mining machines around the world looking to solve the puzzle and crea

From the article, emphasis my own: > So, at any given time, there are millions of bitcoin mining machines around the world looking to solve the puzzle and create the next block, and there’s a natural feedback mecha­nism to ensure that blocks are created on average every ten minutes, regard­less of how many miners are on the network. > We recently saw in the first half of 2021 that China banned crypto mining, and approx­i­mately half the network went offline and started moving elsewhere. Bitcoin’s payment network briefly slowed down a bit, but other­wise kept working with 100% uptime. It's no assertion that the transaction amount is not proportional to the energy being used. That energy only serves as the network's security through proof-of-work. Proof-of-stake you referred to is also mentioned in the article, as follows: > Besides a larger amount of complexity, trust, and attack surfaces, the main issue with proof-of-stake is that it can be prone to central­iza­tion. The more coins you have, the more voting power you have, and those with the coins are also the ones earning the new coins from staking. Since they don’t need to expend resources to stake, they can simply increase their overall staking amount as they earn ongoing coins from staking rewards, and exponen­tially grow their influ­ence on the network over time. PoS, although more complex to implement, has value, but it's more likely to become centralized when compared to PoW due to the reasons mentioned.