But this is my argument exactly, perhaps I did not explain it clearly, I am saying that the price drives electricity consumption - as miners make more money (due to a rising price) then they will spend more money on electricity, thus electricity consumption follows the price.
Yeah, you didn't.
However, I am also saying that there will be a cap on the amount of electricity that the network can use and when we are at or about that cap it will signal the approximate maximum sustained price, as if miners cannot acquire more electricity their costs will not increase and there will be no reason for them not to sell at a lower price.
And you're back at it one phrase later.
I already have told you that the price has gone up 6 times with the hashrate and thus directly proportional electricity consumption just around 20%, right now miners are really not caring about electricity costs at all.
Take a look at how numbers look for an s19pro in terms of costs (even at 10cents/kwh) vs profit.
The price can go to trillions with the energy consumption making baby steps, the proof is what is happening for already 5 months.
That is not an assumption it is an assertion - it is the crux of my argument - I am saying that the network will not exceed 1% because socially and economically there is no justification for it to do so. There is insufficient benefit to the world as a whole for more than 1% of worldwide electricity generation to be consumed by Bitcoin.
The whole theory is again flawed because you're expressing it in 1% globablly.
Some countries which are net importers of energy and they have limited capacity that is not flexible might raise an eyebrow even at 0.2%, some countries would not care even at 5% because they have spare capacity that simply stays offline for 90% period of the time. It's also a different thing in terms of what that 1% would represent to the budget of the country, for some is 6% (US case, and in this, we include oil and gas), thus 1% of it would represent 0.06 for other is less than 1% and it would go in fractions of a thousand.
Firstly that is why I have set my "limit" at more than double the current consumption - as I say above I don't know what the limit is, but I am arguing there is one and for the sake of the argument I picked a value to hang my hat on!
So basically there must be something out there because if it isn't things don't make sense to you and this is not tolerable
. You know, at this point rather than trying to find facts to back up your theory wouldn't it is better to see how many facts are against it and come up with a new one?
Secondly my prediction only sets an upper limit it does not set a lower limit at all. As you rightly say there is nothing to prevent the price being far far below the maximum implied by the power consumption cap. However, I would expect total consumption of the network to fall if the price fell and remained significantly lower for an extended period.
It won't.
If the price would crash to half its value the consumption will probably not go down even 1%, almost everything that is plugged in right now and burning energy would still be profitable and with new more efficient gear to come and replace the old ones it would still keep that consumption.
Remember, we were doing 120EH/s at 10k, at that rate of profitability, we could still consume more energy than now by 50% even if the price drops to 20k.
We'd need to have good historic power consumption data to model the past accurately, and to be fair we don't even have good current data let alone historic!) but as I say the values can clearly diverge significantly for a period, the question is can they stay apart or will they tend to converge? I think the latter.
For at least one year there will be no converging point.
Simply put, there is not enough production capacity for new miners, there is a chip shortage, and they would need to produce 6 times more gear than they have in 4 years. One more doubling of the price which can be triggered by stimulus money or Amazon investing in
BTC and Bitmain would have to increase its production capacity by 10x, which is simply not doable.
So no, at least for one or maybe two years there will be no converging as the consumption is currently heavily influenced by factors that have nothing to do with bitcoin.
As for the data, it's quite easy to approximate it
https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/It's not rocket science, you just have to look at hashrate, what hashrate/w can miners deliver, and check when those were launched and when they stopped productions of certain models. Indeed it's approximate, it becomes muddy when suddenly old gear is back online after being retired but overall it does a pretty good job.
