> It's not a bad thing: efficiency gains are good. But they don't reduce the total energy expenditure, because they incentivise increased mining.
I think it's a stretch to say the two are perfectly linked.
If you dropped someone's electricity price in half, would they buy twice the equipment to mine? If you dropped it to 1%, would they buy 100x as much equipment?
That's not exactly the question. It's more like if you dropped the price of electricity to 1% would 100x as many people participate. The answer to that is generally yes.
Would they? There are still significant fixed costs for a risky reward. A quick way of looking at the extreme end is: does everyone with free electricity do it?
