[smartbit]

Good question.

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?

[foepys]

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.

A Bitcoin transaction uses about 1,005 kWh, while 100,000 VISA transactions use 169 kWh, according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-co...

[kenforthewin]

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?

[rcxdude]

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.

[nybble41]

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.

[p1necone]

According to the numbers above a bitcoin transaction is currently 591715 times as expensive (in kwh) as a visa transaction.

If a transaction costs half as much power every 4 years that's only 193 years until it's cheaper than visa[0]! Truly the financial instrument of the (distant) future!

[0] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=x%5E2+%3D+%281005%2F%2...

[nybble41]

Visa doesn't solve the same problems as Bitcoin, so this isn't comparing apples to apples. Bitcoin isn't a centralized, credit-based payment network; it was designed as an electronic alternative to cash. (Don't forget to include the economic and social cost of global anti-counterfeiting measures necessary to maintain the USD market value in the cost of the Visa system!) Also, the reward halving schedule applies to blocks, not transactions. Any of the scaling solutions which increase the number of transactions per block (e.g. the Lightning network) will proportionally reduce the power expended per transaction.

[roywiggins]

There's no way that a single $6 credit card transaction uses as much energy as sending $6 worth of bitcoin, which is the relevant measure.

[monadic2]

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.

[Barrin92]

>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.

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

[johnisgood]

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.

[jodrellblank]

All the electricity we generate becomes waste heat in the atmoshpere. Global energy use is currently ~0.1% of Sun power hitting the Earth. USA uses ~10x more electricity per person than India does, assume bringing everyone up to USA levels means we'll be around 1% of Sun power. Grow the population from ~8Bn to predicted ~12Bn and we'll be around 1.5%.

And then everyone gets "too cheap to meter" fusion power? There is not a /lot/ of headroom there, we surely can't go to outputting as much waste heat again as the planet gets from The Sun - and before you say "solar", you already said "fusion".

[mlonkibjuyhv]

Energy usage will explode! Imagine all the ways to use energy that hasn't been economically viable before. I think the only way that will work out, is if the energy consumption happens off-planet.

[carlob]

Pretty sure the difficulty will go up accordingly then

[drexlspivey]

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.

[saagarjha]

Most Bitcoins are mined in places I do not live, since my electricity prices are nowhere near economical to mine in.

[Barrin92]

>Luckily there is a mechanism for resource allocation and it is called price

I mean we don't really have that in the case of bitcoin, which is predominantly mined in China these days probably precisely because state subsidised energy projects have created a ton of useless energy surplus, on which bitcoin lives.

Which is ironic in and of itself, the libertarian currency de jure runs on the misallocated resources of a state planned economy lol.

Just imagine if the transactions actually costed as much as their energy consumption suggests and environmental damage priced in.

[_lqaf]

I'm not sure that's ironic. A lot of libertarian types don't seem to mind authoritarians as business partners, they just don't want to live that way.

[monadic2]

Yea, after reading more I got a sense of the scale.

Still, I think that's the proper comparison—human processes are the analogue to keeping a blockchain online and mining.

[cedilla]

The difference is that there's no mechanism in banking that keeps ramping up the difficulty exponentially.

All the energy in bitcoin is not wasted on keeping and organizing that tiny ledger (barely 300 GB of data!), it's wasted on brute forcing hashes, with the energy required ramping up exponentially with interest in bitcoin.

As ingenious as bitcoin is, that is a fatal flaw. Using bitcoin is like rolling coal, only worse for the environment.

[roywiggins]

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.

[davidgerard]

Yes, they did! Note that, like you, 0 bitcoiners who have ever raised this objection put a number in.

* Bitcoin: 0.1% of all electricity, 7 transactions per second.

* THE ENTIRE REST OF CIVILISATION, FINANCIAL SYSTEM AND ALL: 99.9% of electricity, a heck of a lot more than 6,993 transactions per second.

[wing-_-nuts]

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!