| from the article you linked: > Of course, VISA runs call centers, offices, and a whole lot else on electricity as well, which isn't counted in this comparison. But those hardly matter due to the extreme difference between the two figures. ---
I think this absolutely needs to be counted, because it is an operating cost of the entity. With bitcoin, there are no call centers because by design, the transactions are irreversable. When pitted against the total cost of financial institutions, which all independently hold massive amounts of customer data, which should be considered a liability due to the recent issues with consumer data here in the West. This further increases the operating costs of each institution because they are running servers to house account data. Imagine a global, catastrophic EMI event. Even a temporary one would cause introduce to these systems (like visa), a higher likelihood of race conditions where accounts will not reconcile, causing a higher cost to converge. Bitcoin does not necessarily have this problem. If we are truly worried about the future costs of running financial systems, maybe we should also add liabilities into the mix. |