Yup, servers doing math are going to be the end of us. Definitely nothing to do with the century old fossil fuel systems that unnecessarily dominate our energy grid.
did you even read the thread? 8GW is only one country's commercial mining load, and it's already more than the world's largest nuclear power facility can generate at full capacity. it's a nation state's worth of energy wasted on purpose with *guaranteed* year-on-year increases.
The block rewards continue to drop rapidly and most of the revenue comes from those. There's no guarantee overall Bitcoin fees will increase enough to make up for that or that they'll keep increasing. The amount of money is limited to the total paid for inclusion in the blocks.
Right now, the vast majority of the money doesn't come from fees but rather the rapidly decreasingly block rewards. Over time, it ends up having to be entirely funded through fees. 1/10 of the mining or 10x as much mining would work the same way. Doesn't impact throughput, etc.
It's not something with unbounded / limitless growth. The total amount of fees paid becomes the entire revenue source for miners. Higher fees create more pressure to use 2nd layers like Lightning, or a side chain like Liquid, or something less secure / custodial.
if that one system is already using abominable amounts of energy, the bound doesn't matter. not to mention the other systems cropping up to try to compete, each bringing their own ridiculous energy use.
I'm not defending it. I'm explaining that your description of it as some kind of unbounded growth doesn't make sense. The revenue for miners is going to entirely based on the total amount of fees. It's temporarily based primarily on block rewards, which are rapidly going away.
Unless you think that there's unbounded demand for inclusion in Bitcoin blocks and that people would pay thousands or tends of thousands of dollars per transaction. There's a limit on what people will pay for transactions and they'll be pushed to 2nd layers, side chains, etc.