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.
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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.
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It's only bounded if you assume there's only one system, which there isn't, and the bound only matters if it's below a safe threshold of energy consumption, which it isn't either.
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The revenue has to come from somewhere. Right now, it primarily comes from people buying BTC due to block rewards, not transactions. In the future, it has to come entirely from fees from transactions.
I don't think there's a limitless market for other PoW cryptocurrencies.
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Again, the limit is meaningless if the limit is far in excess of what is safely consumable.
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It's far less than 1% of power being used and it's not a system with unbounded growth. I don't really see what's unsafe about it. Compare it to something like meat production, which has a disproportionately high impact on greenhouse gases far beyond the electricity use too.
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Bitcoin is not actually something resembling a paperclip optimizer. Price grew very rapidly, far more than most people would have expected, and since block rewards are still a major thing (rapidly fading away) that created immense mining demand. How would the demand be sustained?
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I really don't think people are willing to pay anything close to that much in fees. Out of necessity, people will be forced to use stuff like Lightning, Liquid, etc. as demand for transactions increases. Not realistic for people to pay thousands of USD or more per transaction.
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jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,24h
Transaction fees as measured in BTC aren't at a historical high or trending to one. Everyone can't use on-chain transactions for small payments. It doesn't work, and people have learned that. It's only a base layer, and demand has to be filled above that.
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People have a huge incentive to avoid paying fees via different approaches, some of them in the spirit of a decentralized currency (Lightning, federated side chains to some extent) and others not (custodial wallets / exchanges using those earlier approaches between each other).
At least to me, it seems pretty clear total revenue for BTC mining will substantially drop. The remaining miners will be the most efficient ones, driving out the rest. Most efficient doesn't imply clean, just cheapest. If subsidized coal power is the cheapest, they'll use that.