Explain to me how they prevent the energy requirements of proof of work securing the entire cryptocoin infrastructure from growing significantly faster than the market using that infrastructure, and without compromising the whole reason behind cryptocurrencies in the first place, which is decentralization and lack of trust?
Hm I'm not sure I understand, because the answer seems very simple: because they dramatically increase ratio of the number of meaningful transactions describing real economic activity to a MB of valueable block space (and therefore per watt of total global PoW calculation).
If all they do is increase the ratio, that's only constant scaling. So in no way does it compensate for the scaling of PoW energy use with respect to market size.
Why would you assume it would be constant? What equations you are using? How exactly are you projecting the market size to POW increase, and how do you calculate L2 changes? "Increase" the ratio does not mean it will increase by *2, it can be ^2 or whatever other formula might end up being real.
