Data centers and cloud providers are optimizing flops per watt, not flops per second. Energy providers are finding that wind and solar have become incredibly cheap, and transitioning as fast as they can. It took us a while to overcome political hurdles erected by the carbon-burning industry, but it turns out this stuff just makes sense on an economic level.
Not sure it's happening as fast as you seem to indicate here. And if it is, what's the problem with Bitcoin and energy consumption, exactly the same thing will happen, but faster since Bitcoin is all about money?
Where did I indicate a timescale (outside of "it took us a while" -- wherein I said that progress is slow)? As many others have pointed out, energy efficiency is seen as a bug and bitcoin has repeatedly increased hashing difficulty in order to offset increasing efficiency. Likewise, if a locale is known to have cheap power, miners move in until the power isn't cheap anymore. Eventually we'll be on 90+% renewables, and it won't be as bad, but ultimately, bitcoin is a space heater, and never a battery unless you devise a system to capture, store, and generate electricity from that heat.
On the topic of space heaters, though... if you replace your gas furnace with a bitcoin mining rig, and your electric is 100% renewable, then that's fine by me.
It will not. Bitcoin is literally designed specifically to make sure this never happens.
Again, as soon as you manage to develop a way to mine bitcoin more efficiently, the difficulty of mining will automatically go up to make sure you are still wasting just as much energy.
the diff goes up for everyone, not just you. you still have a relative advantage over all the other miners who have not yet reproduced your efficiency gains.
'relative difficulty' was never germane to the discussion. The point is that the system self-corrects for more efficient energy use by increasing its energy use. And its a lot of energy.
