Miners are selling you space in the block they're building, which you pay for with a transaction fee. But that block is getting built either way as long as it is profitable.
Putting this in terms of distributed systems, we would say that the act of mining a block is the act of executing a view change (or a leader election). We would say that transactions are the messages sent to all nodes during the epoch. Obviously a system that only executes view-changes is not an interesting system, and nor is a system that just transmits messages but cannot order them or decide which are accepted by other nodes. But my original point is, these are separate operations, and only one of them is energy-intensive.
Trying to say that both view-changes and message transmission are energy intensive because just one of them is not only belies a fundamental lack of understanding of how the system operates, but also hinders an effective regulatory response to stopping the real problem: pollution from fossil fuels.
Putting this in terms of distributed systems, we would say that the act of mining a block is the act of executing a view change (or a leader election). We would say that transactions are the messages sent to all nodes during the epoch. Obviously a system that only executes view-changes is not an interesting system, and nor is a system that just transmits messages but cannot order them or decide which are accepted by other nodes. But my original point is, these are separate operations, and only one of them is energy-intensive.
Trying to say that both view-changes and message transmission are energy intensive because just one of them is not only belies a fundamental lack of understanding of how the system operates, but also hinders an effective regulatory response to stopping the real problem: pollution from fossil fuels.