[leroman]

Don't know how it compares but for "classic" finance to work it needs many workers who use energy, who need buildings to cost energy, who need cooling etc.. The work being done by the miners is not apples to apples comparison with OracleDB sitting behind IBM Websphere server (or what ever) inside a banks data center / cloud. I do hope that in the future somebody comes up with a better scheme..

[dx034]

[1] has a chart comparing Bitcoin energy consumption to that of the Visa payment network. Bitcoin is magnitudes higher.

[1] http://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

[acchow]

This is only Visa's datacenter costs. What about all the employees working at banks to support all these credit card holders? What about all the physical snail mail being carried around by actual vehicles and driven by humans? What about the entire debt collection system?

[TeMPOraL]

All you've mentioned is secondary infrastructure that facilitates the use of financial system. If ever (God forbid) Bitcoin volume rises to the scale of Visa, it'll have all those costs too. Including the snail-mail shipping of wallet hashes.

[walterstucco]

Programmers are humans too