But once extracted their energy costs are negligible (especially with gold being stored and the rights traded instead of the physical asset a lot of the time). In the case of BTC you can't really separate out the cost of mining a block from validating the transaction because until it's in a block a transaction doesn't really exist (this will get much better with lightning though). But without the constant burn of mining BTC (even post lightning) will be come useless.
Until it IS in a block. Then, like the storage cost of gold or any "real" material, the energy expenditure for maintenance is negligible. In fact, considering the storage requirements of something like bullion I'd argue the maintenance costs are considerably lower.
Yes any given transaction is valid once it is in a block but without continuous mining it's still worthless because it cannot be spent without a new block being mined. And since mining has to be pretty continuous or the whole thing becomes unusable because of loooong processing times the maintenance of the whole network kind of becomes maintenance of the transactions.
Even lightning would only last for a while without new blocks being mined because adding funds to your 'lightning channel' requires a transaction to be placed on the blockchain to open a channel.
You're assuming gold / physicalvaluestores can be spent without shipping cost and exchange fees and that the volume traded reaches 0 in your comparison. Is the volume of any valuestore ever 0?
Also mining doesn't have to be continuious, it's reward varies with volume to adjust the rate mined so you only wait a looong time if suddenly transaction volume spikes.
> You're assuming gold / physicalvaluestores can be spent without shipping cost and exchange fees and that the volume traded reaches 0 in your comparison. Is the volume of any valuestore ever 0?
That's why gold isn't a currency there are definite transaction costs but the whole of the costs of transporting gold spent isn't required for my gold to be spent. With BTC the whole network supports all transactions and all transactions require the mining network for validation.
> mining doesn't have to be continuious, it's reward varies with volume to adjust the rate mined so you only wait a looong time if suddenly transaction volume spikes.
Mining has to continue as a whole though is what I'm meaning. Because it has not physical value and no ability to transfer without active mining the utility and value of BTC is inherently tied to the act of mining. There's also a hard minimum of active mining where the network remains secure against 51%/double spending attacks.
> That's why gold isn't a currency there are definite transaction costs but the whole of the costs of transporting gold spent isn't required for my gold to be spent.
Whole costs for transporting gold are definitely required to be spent... the gold must be transported from one owner's location to another, unless the escrow between the two parties is the same or you're actually trading ETFs.
> With BTC the whole network supports all transactions and all transactions require the mining network for validation.
This is true for the network as a whole, but not any given transaction. Such a model would mean that the network is topologically fully connected, which would in turn mean that it'd be orders of magnitude slower than it already is.
> That's why gold isn't a currency there are definite transaction costs but the whole of the costs of transporting gold spent isn't required for my gold to be spent.
What I'm trying to say here is that my transaction doesn't depend on the energy required to transport all the gold traded.
