The key difference between Christmas lights and Bitcoin mining is that each additional watt-hour spent on Christmas lighting provides more light (and presumably, enjoyment to somebody).
Beyond a certain point*, each additional watt-hour spent on Bitcoin mining doesn't make Bitcoin any better. It doesn't deliver more value at all. It's just a rat race between miners trying to get a bigger slice of the rewards pie.
It's like if there was a fixed amount of Christmas-lighting in the world, and each new person who plugged in Christmas lights got some of it in proportion to how much power they drew. So when you plug your lights in, everybody else's get a little dimmer, but you all still use electricity.
* The "certain point" being the point at which the mining expenses make a 51% attack unprofitable. That's all the security Bitcoin needs, more security than that is waste with no benefit. There is nothing in the Bitcoin protocol that causes mining to stabilize at this level and not overshoot it. Or undershoot it for that matter -- but we can conclude we haven't been undershooting it so far by the lack of attacks.
> That's all the security Bitcoin needs, more security than that is waste with no benefit.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of security spend. You just don't know how much is enough. If you could provide a trustless (or.. maybe even useless, trusted) mechanism for determining appropriate security spend, there is many Billion dollar industries that would love to hear it.
I agree that I don't know how much is enough, and that nobody really can know how much is enough. But that doesn't mean it's impossible to overspend on security.
Bitcoin's model for how much to spend is basically just "pick a number". Right now it's 37.5 BTC per hour. In 2024 it will be halved. Is it way too much now? (I suspect so, but I don't know so). Will it be too little after the halving? (Probably not). The next halving, or the one after that? Who knows.
christmas lights are mostly LEDs now, which are super low power. i think our lighting setup was less than 5W draw total, and they only run for a few hours/day
