Has anyone written about how it would affect energy markets if Bitcoin reached the flippening price? If the price did hit $500k, as of the most recent halving it would be profitable to keep spinning up miners until aggregate mining costs reached $72 million. Even assuming 80% of marginal mining costs is energy, that's a lot of additional demand on energy markets.
That's assuming that the mining hardware doesn't get more power efficient (obviously, that ALSO means miners are profitable at higher hashrates, so more total miners).
I think there may be a future where energy is no longer the deciding factor in profitability vs the hardware itself and operational costs (land, employees etc). Which could mean less power consumption despite climbing hashrate.
> That's assuming that the mining hardware doesn't get more power efficient
The efficiency of the mining equipment doesn't really matter.
It is always worth spending almost as much money on electricity as the cryptocurrency generated. If someone comes up with a more efficient miner, it is profitable for them to roll those out until the power equation levels out again.
Mining equipment efficiency affects the total network hashrate, but not the overall power consumption.
> That's assuming that the mining hardware doesn't get more power efficient
If mining gets more power efficient, holding everything else the same, the difficulty will go up until the efficiency improvement is negated. Bitcoin is designed such that efficiency improvements are eaten up; otherwise every time there was en efficiency improvement it would become cheaper to attack the network.
> I think there may be a future where energy is no longer the deciding factor in profitability vs the hardware itself and operational costs (land, employees etc).
What would the catalyst be? If anything I see this going in the opposite directions: the more money at stake in mining, the more it makes sense to make big, efficiency-improving investments that take upfront capital but are amortized over time.
The one exception to this would be if there were a truly breakthrough improvement in hashing technology that was captured by a single miner, in which case that miner could essentially force everyone out of the market by pushing the difficulty above everyone else's break-even point.
(To say nothing of the climate impact!)