OTOH, did anyone ever consider the average pollution of the banking system? 10.000th of banks, 200+ central banks, BIS, IMF, ECB, etc, etc. Millions of employees, millions of desktops & servers, day-in-day out. Anyone with a link to a guestimate?
The Bitcoin network allegedly uses the amount of energy as the whole country of Denmark. This includes heavy industries like aluminum smelting that more or less use as much power as they are allowed to.
Unclear what goes into calculating the visa transactions. Is it just the literal cost of sending the bits over the wire? Does it include the cost of servers, man-power, real estate, etc?
It's basically the cost of Visa running divided by the number of transactions they do. So yes it includes everything. You don't need to play silly tricks like that to make Bitcoin look bad. Bitcoin uses similar or more energy than the banking system while processing vastly fewer transactions. Somehow people can't comprehend how ridiculously inefficient bitcoin transactions are.
It's the inflation that's expensive, not the transaction processing. The threshold for economical power use in bitcoin mining scales in proportion to the block reward, not block size or number of transactions. Since the rate of inflation decreases exponentially (the block reward in BTC halves every four years) this issue will eventually resolve itself.
Yea but a whole fraud department of humans emits a ton of carbon. There's no way the banking and finance industry doesn't compete emissions wise with bitcoin.
>There's no way the banking and finance industry doesn't compete emissions wise with bitcoin
not on a per transaction basis, which is the only relevant measure because the banking system supports a lot more people than bitcoin does.
A single bitcoin transaction uses 610.20 kWh right now, which is comparable to the energy consumption of an average US household over 20 days.[1]
Also for a comparison of scope, Tenpay, Tencents payment service processes about 1.2 billion transactions per day, Bitcoin does about 300k. If all financial transactions conducted in China alone would consume the amount of energy that a bitcoin transaction does, it would roughly eclipse the energy the country consumes in a year, in one day.
I cannot wait for nuclear fusion to finally be here so people will stop worrying about the electricity consumption, and high consumption will not mean pollution or whatever.
Luckily there is a mechanism for resource allocation and it is called price. I pay for 1 MWh, you pay for 1MWh and it doesn't matter what we use the energy for.
If you have an issue with how the energy is generated take it up with your local government.
Fraud departments provide a pretty useful service to consumers. The existing finance system is so much larger than the Bitcoin economy that it's no surprise if they, in total, rival Bitcoin in energy intensity. It processes orders of magnitude more transactions and provides other services that people use that have no Bitcoin equivalents.
This isn't a defense of the modern financial system, which is arguably a trash fire for plenty of reasons, but of course it's fairly energy intensive. It's massive. If it were replaced entirely by Bitcoin, it would be even more intensive.
I personally can't wait until most crypto currencies move to proof of stake over proof of work. I wish the UN would coordinate some sort of global carbon tax initiative. Want to mine crypto? Ok, but you're paying for the co2. No more free rides!