[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.

[Tijdreiziger]

Credit-based transactions are a subset of Visa transactions. Visa Debit and V PAY were indeed designed as an electronic alternative to cash (as were MasterCard Debit and Maestro on the MasterCard side).