Edit: thanks for the replies, on second thought it is pretty tricky to know a file you’re writing already exists without trusting the process doing the copying
Or take banks. I was amazed to see how much manual work is done in financial institutions. Skyscrapers with bank name on top of it filled with tens of thousands people. Everyone has computer, among other things burning electricity. Separately, datacenters. How does it compares to crypto? I doubt it's less, if sum up all banks.
But anyway, av-scanning is doing much good, but can be socially out-engineered in a single click, making it useless in most critical cases.
Crypto's current energy consumption is doing a miniscule fraction of the transaction handling that banks are. If you scaled up current crypto to match banks, I don't think that would even be possible.
AFAIK The number of transactions per block and the rate at which blocks are confirmed has nothing to do with how many people are burning through hashes.
And the price of a token is a kind of bounty for mining a block: the higher the price, the more money can be spent trying to win the bounty while still being profitable. You wouldn't see data centers full of ASICs if the reward was only a few hundred bucks.
So how straight forward is it?
>the transaction volume it can support will never change
is plainly ridiculous (as proof: transaction volume has changed, and multiple changes have been successfully made that increase the peak volume), and is also covered by your:
>AFAIK The number of transactions per block and the rate at which blocks are confirmed has nothing to do with how many people are burning through hashes.
as for:
>the energy consumption rises as a function of the price, with no upper bound.
though there's obviously some relation to price and electricity use (i.e. hashing power, ignoring tech improvements), that direct relation really only makes sense with the per-block rewards... which keep halving, and that does not immediately lead to 1/2 hashing power. the market has repeatedly demonstrated that price and value-per-block do not directly relate to hashing/electricity. on top of that, transaction fees are taking a larger and larger proportion of it, and that's related pretty much solely to transaction volume (which does not noticeably affect electricity, as you pointed out), not value per coin or electricity.
as far as "no upper bound"... only if you ignore market effects, like if electricity became free globally. since it's market-driven though, as beyond a certain point it's not profitable, you can't ignore that. and again, hashing power has dropped many times in the past, clearly demonstrating effective upper bounds at any given time.
This fact should stay true for another 2-3 halvings (including same energy consumption if price doubles which is the same), until the factor 0.5 (energy consumption after halving) starts to increase to 1 when/if higher fees compensate for the diminished issuance of new coins (while issuance of new coins goes to 0).
Because fees for now are very low, in the big picture and almost not relevant in the power consumption calculstions.
But until these about 2-4 halvings happen (=Y), price might increased by factor X and energy consumption only X/2^Y (which could even be a decrease if price does not go up much!). And if price would stay the same, then energy consumption would actually drop by 50% every halving! (if all other things being equal and supply of miners and mining chips were not a problem).
So to sum it up differently: Bitcoin consumes a lot of energy to have a fair new issuance of coins. Instead of being created out of nothing and being distributed unfairly (worldwide privacy issuance of a new coin is REALISTICALLY very very very hard, and has been tried by many projects and all failed), bitcoin gives you new coins for the same amount that you burn energy, so you can‘t fake it or corrupt it in the hands of politicians or any other left/right/religious/… group
> Or take banks. I was amazed to see how much manual work is done in financial institutions. Skyscrapers with bank name on top of it filled with tens of thousands people. Everyone has computer, among other things burning electricity. Separately, datacenters. How does it compares to crypto? I doubt it's less, if sum up all banks.
You'd be likely wrong. Bitcoin now uses the same energy as the whole country of Argentina with 43 million people. For comparison Bank of America has 200 000 employees. Are there more than 200 banks of that size, maybe but I'm doubtful. Moreover Argentinas energy consumption includes vastly more energy intensive endeavours than banking (manufacturing, mining etc). from that estimate I would be very doubtful that the whole banking sector uses more energy than bitcoin mining. Moreover as others pointed out the banking sector serves many more people with many services that bitcoin can't provide.
From there the more the "outside"/"inside" line gets blurry (e.g. what if it was synced from Dropbox ? or data got injected by an arbitrary program etc.), the more it becomes justified to just scan every file moving anywhere. If the goal is indeed to scan files in the first place.
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[in, optional] hTemplateFile
A valid handle to a template file with the GENERIC_READ access right. The template file supplies file attributes and extended attributes for the file that is being created.
For other operating systems, sure, but the Win32 API has a function literally called CopyFile (and its variants CopyFileEx and CopyFileTransacted).