No, not unless the energy consumption when taking into account actual average usage is lower than a car where the consumption is tied directly to the same level of usage.
If you really believe that constant rate O(1) is always superior to usage-based consumption, then send me $3000 a month for your electricity bill regardless of how much power you use. Of course, Bitcoin still has an upper limit on how many transactions per-second it can fulfill, so similarly you would still have an upper limit on how much electricity you can use throughout each month.
But, you'd pay $3000 to me regardless of whether you had your fridge running or not, so technically the fridge is now free to run, right?
You’re effectively saying, “that’s bad, because it’s like a good scenario that happens to be bad in this case”. What explanation do you think you’re improving upon?
It's good if cars use gasoline even when they're not being driven? If people aren't understanding the comparison, then fine, I'm open to better ones, but my point is that it's not improving energy numbers to expend energy even when transactions aren't happening. Even in the world of public transportation, that's an undesirable outcome that we would love to avoid if possible.
I'm not sure what the better comparison would be. Having a fridge lightbulb that stays on even when the door is closed? Running your shower 24/7 to make the number of showers you take independent of the water usage? Take your pick, I'm not married to cars, anything will work.
My point is that anyone can make any system O(1) energy cost by never turning off the thing they're using. You could make your car O(1) energy right now by forcing the engine to run at full speed even in your garage. But in most cases, we recognize that this is bad for energy usage, so it doesn't make sense in the world of cryptocurrency for people to argue that they can invalidate a measure of efficiency as a criticism by purposefully being less efficient.
And I think in those situations, it still does make a lot of sense to compare the total energy expenditure to the actual amount of usage it gets. I don't think that turning on a shower 24/7 means that it no longer makes sense to ask how many showers a household takes, I think that it just makes the water usage to shower ratio really bad. I think similarly, it makes a ton of sense to look at the amount of energy mining is using and compare that to the number of transactions per second that are actually happening on the network.
If my car burns 30 gallons of gas every week regardless of how much I drive, then that'd be pretty damn bad considering I work from home and drive <15 miles per week on average. The fact that I could then drive a 2,000+ mile road trip and still only burn that 30 gallons doesn't make it good if I never make a road trip like that.
You’re just validating my point that it’s a bad analogy in terms of blurring more than it clarifies.
If you have a public bus that seats at max 20 people, and it's continuously running on a loop, it is entirely appropriate to take the gasoline cost of running the bus for one loop, divide it by the average number of people who ride each loop, and compare that to the costs of normal transportation.
If the bus uses way more gasoline per loop than is justified by transporting 10-20 people each loop, then riding the bus is bad for the environment. It would be wild to look at that situation and say, "well, the bus is going to spend that power regardless, so actually riding it is environmentally free and the criticism doesn't make sense."
The bus exists because of the passengers, and how much work it's doing per loop and the number of passengers it's serving should factor into an analysis of whether it's worth keeping it around.
Similarly, Bitcoin's POW system exists to provide transactions, and it is entirely reasonable to take the average number of transactions it processes per block and ask whether it's good that Bitcoin spends so much energy to process so few transactions.
It's especially valid to question whether it's good that Bitcoin's energy usage can increase without increasing the number of transactions it handles. At least with a public bus, the amount of gasoline it uses doesn't start dramatically rising just because the bus became more popular, independently of how often it makes a loop or what its seat capacity is.
