I mean, sure, but they're still enabling crypto payments and I very, very much wish they wouldn't. Whether you can withdraw as crypto or not, they're still adding transactions to the block chain and causing everyone to pay that energy cost
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Transferring around Bitcoin with PayPal doesn't result in any on-chain transactions. The only on-chain transactions would be them buying and selling it in bulk to grow or shrink their reserves as needed. They don't need any significant amount of transactions for what they do.
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They provide a way for people to speculate on the price, not to make any on-chain transactions. You can't use PayPal to make a Bitcoin transaction. You can use it to make a PayPal transaction based on the price of Bitcoin, like other currencies they support.
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Ah, interesting. I hadn't realised they were operating as a reserve broker, though either way I really don't want them or anyone else encouraging the use of cryptocurrencies.
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Specifically, I don't want to create a distinction between transactions-within-broker and transactions-between-brokers that further mask away and confuse the impacts that the use of these currencies incur
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On-chain transactions are only usable as a settlement layer. The fee for sending 1000 BTC is the same as 1 BTC if both were a single UTXO. The arbitrary limits on block size and time don't accommodate doing on-chain transactions for absolutely everything. Have to use 2nd layers.
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Nothing prevents making Bitcoin support 1000x as many transactions by having 10x faster block time and 100x larger blocks. It isn't a viable way to scale it up to support every little transaction though.
Resource use for mining isn't directly related to transaction throughput.
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If it supported 1000x as many transactions, it would need 1000x more storage space, so it would be much harder to run a node. There would be more space, so more transactions, but lower fees. Miners would end up getting near zero money from fees until it filled up to 100% again.
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Once fees are the primary source of mining revenue, the amount of mining will be tied to the amount of demand for block space. At the moment, that's not really the case, because most money comes from the base block reward. As that drops, it will shift to being based more on fees.
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Once mining revenue is tied to fees, they'll depend entirely on the competition for block space. There's a limited amount of revenue to be split between miners.
More miners just increases difficulty. It doesn't increase the rate of transactions or the overall reward revenue.
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It splits the limited revenue between more miners, so the least efficient ones start losing money and get turned off. It isn't actually a system with unbounded growth. Hash rate dropping drops the difficulty and it goes on the same with lower security against picking new history.