It’s actually the opposite since the block reward goes down over time
It’s actually the opposite since the block reward goes down over time
It is true that 10 years ago block rewards were almost 10x what they are today in terms of BTC, but by USD value new rewards are worth several orders of magnitude more today.
See history of block reward in dollars[1]. This the miner's collective budget to find blocks.
It's about 350K USD per 10 minutes now, or 2.1M USD/hour. Pick an industrial electricity price, say 0.05 USD/kWh. That budget will then buy 42 GWh/hour, or 42 gigawatt of power continuously (roughly 2% of global power consumption). Of course, miners have other costs, and their growth is lagging this ceiling. But it gives you an idea.
That's why I think we're heading for overshoot, and future block reward halvings will come too late.