> But mining and transactions are conflated here! The author is right to point out the HBR author's conflict of interest, but there's a more direct rebuttal to

> But mining and transactions are conflated here! The author is right to point out the HBR author's conflict of interest, but there's a more direct rebuttal to this. One of the purported advantages of bitcoin is that transactions are (practically) irreversible. It's extremely expensive for a bad actor to reverse a transaction because the mining power of the network is subsidized by mining. Since the people making transactions are the ones directly benefiting from the power spent on mining, it is reasonable to look at the energy use on a per-transaction basis.