> Now at some point there is a market incentive to develop mining techniques that optimize for less energy consumption above all else. This would lead to better

> Now at some point there is a market incentive to develop mining techniques that optimize for less energy consumption above all else. This would lead to better technologies and thus environment friendly mining techniques. That's the insidious thing about PoW, though: it will absorb efficiency improvements by design. If a chip came out tomorrow that halved the amount of energy used per hash, instead of halving the CO2 use of PoW, miners would be incentivized just to double the network hash rate.