Quote from: juvo_3 on February 19, 2018, 04:09:37 AM

My understanding is that the miners have a control parameter which is "how much hashing power do I provide to the system" and that choice of control is governed by the profit of the block (profit = gross profit from block creation - [electricity + other overheads]). The gross profit from block creation is made of two functions:
- constant block reward (currently 12.5 and will halve in the future untill it becomes very small)
- transaction fees (highest fees picked from the mempool)

from this reasoning, there is currently a significant relation between electricity consumption and price of BTC, given that miners have this control parameter. But my thesis is that when the block reward diminishes, then the relation will become related to transaction fees (which should be governed by the number of transactions.)

So i guess what i want to talk about is whether what we perceive as a "limitation at present" will be the same when the block reward is no longer there (To clarify, not the limitation of transaction per second).

Miners can definitely control the amount of hash power that they want to contribute, most likely by turning on and off the miners that they own. I'm pretty sure they can try to control the clock speed that their miners run at. The problem is that miners don't really mess with them. ASICs do have a specific frequency to run at such that they have the maximum efficiency. Each miners do cost miner to keep and they should be on at all times. Else, it is a net loss and a dead weight to the miner.

Quote from: juvo_3 on February 19, 2018, 04:09:37 AM

Yes, my first point of reference was the news articles. But surely there is a scaling of electricity consumption with hashing power in the network? I don't want to claim that the values in the articles were accurate. But isn't there more electricity consumption? and how does it scale with PoW? And how will it scale in the future?

Yes. While more hashrate does mean that the electrical consumption will increase, it is assuming that the hardware doesn't change.

Quote from: juvo_3 on February 19, 2018, 04:09:37 AM

In regards to my assumption, I am not assuming that the consumption of more electricity causes a change in Bitcoin price. I am suggesting that the Bitcoin Price will effect the miners profit which will change their game theoretic choice to put more hashing power on the network. So higher BTC price results in Higher Hash Rate when the block profit function is dominated by the constant term of block reward. I hope I am making sense.

That's somewhat correct. The prices is definitely partially influenced by the miner since they do sell some Bitcoins. However, more often than not, the prices is not representative of how much hashrate there is on the network. There is no metric to compare against.