> The thing that increases the energy usage is the price of bitcoin.
This simply tells us that bitcoin has a dumb cost structure. Apparently its inventors didn't think about that either. But that's not our problem. Our problem is measuring efficiency, and for that we need a measure of efficiency. And a measure of efficiency needs to be chosen in terms of how good it is at measuring efficiency, not in terms of how good it is at hiding that a certain payment system has a dumb cost structure.