It is how bitcoin is designed to work, but it also shows very directly how proof-of-work systems can never scale to be the global monetary replacement its boosters push. If the opposite happened, and the price for some reason sky rocketed to, say, $1 million per bitcoin, it would necessarily mean that it would induce more miners until the difficulty and consequent electricity cost (regardless of the efficiency in electricity generation) also would rise to the neighborhood of $1 million per coin. At the point you're far beyond "Argentina levels" of electricity and getting into "Europe levels" of electricity to run the network.
The electricity demand (and here I mean the overall cost of the electricity, so improvements in $ per kilowatt just mean you need to use more electricity) in proof-of-work systems fundamentally scales linearly with the overall valuation of the coins in the network, which means proof-of-work systems can never scale as large as their fanboys would have you believe.
The electricity demand (and here I mean the overall cost of the electricity, so improvements in $ per kilowatt just mean you need to use more electricity) in proof-of-work systems fundamentally scales linearly with the overall valuation of the coins in the network, which means proof-of-work systems can never scale as large as their fanboys would have you believe.