For a generic non personalized spam, IMHO it would be too expensive to generate and track millions of wallets. They could have placed a tracking pixel for much less (they didn’t, the email is just plain text)
If then it’s some targeted campaign, then yes, a dedicated BTC address makes sense as you said
It’s a conservative estimate, it’s even higher than that
Crypto-biased source: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/08/18/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-use/ (you would expect they downplay the number)
You can just take a calculator and do by yourself the math from publicly available stats https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/
In the past 24 hours a block contains in average only 3500 transactions. Then that block needs to be validated by many other nodes in following calculations.
This is why it’s the most inefficient payment method, very slow (only 3500 transactions in ten minutes instead of few seconds), expensive for the user (transfer fees are high) and power hungry
one candidate must be perfectly immaculate and nit-picked on the smallest detail while the other can do and say what the fuck he wants
please explain how to transfer bitcoin without mining a block, since the transactions are contained there.
You need to take the energy required to mine a block and validate it (a lot, could power a small town), then divide for the few transactions that could be included in just 1 mb.
They impose a size limit on the transactions that can be included, so even if tomorrow the transactions increase 10x, each block could contain the same limited number. Of course, if you only count the electricity used by your machine to send the transaction, it’s just a few milliwatts. The problem is all the garbage calculations that need to be done to actually validate it.