According to one estimate from 2014, Bitcoin miners collectively consumed as much power as the whole of Ireland3. But the current LN as of today is 100% penalty-based, and https://youtu.be/KhLlcWaKMOU it doesn’t seem like it’s going to change much. Relative mining difficulty is defined as the ratio of the difficulty target on 9 January 2009 to the current difficulty target. Bitcoin’s biggest problem is perhaps not even its massive energy consumption, but the fact most mining facilties in Bitcoin’s network are powered by fossil fuels. This way, we can let this run on the network for a while, evaluate how it works in real life, and once it’s in implementation, that way we can also start doing some research on regtest where we simulate networks where attackers are trying different kinds of behaviors and see how the local reputation algorithms work with those type of attacks.