[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.