[rodiger]

How much energy do you think the current financial system consumes? Eg paying for a pack of gum with your Mastercard

Edit: This wasn't intended to be a hypothetical- I agree BTC uses significantly more per transaction, but I'm curious how it compares to the entirety of a system like Mastercard divided by number of transactions (including all employee/office space/commute/etc energy consumption). There are clearer/fewer inputs for Bitcoin for sure but that doesn't mean we shouldn't account for the total environmental cost of a behemoth like Mastercard.

Bitcoin can never and should never replace our current payments network as it simply cannot scale in its current form. But, I do think people simply look at the cost to run the technology itself and assume that's the total environmental cost of a system.

[yunesj]

> I'm curious how it compares to the entirety of a system like Mastercard

You should also include the cost of running all of the world's central banks.

US Federal Reserve budget is about $5B. Assuming 328.5k BTC mined per year, no tx fees, $20k BTC value, and mining at break even, mining energy costs are about $6.57B. It seems like they're on the same order of magnitude.

I am more concerned about the misaligned incentives for PoW, and to a lesser extent for PoS.

[jpsalm]

Significantly less energy per transaction, which is the only metric that matters.

[zadler]

Lightning network will also scale to millions of transactions per second and consume much less than each Bitcoin transaction.

[jpsalm]

Yes, non-blockchain transactions are much more efficient. But then what's the point of using blockchain if transactions happen off-chain?

[jcranmer]

The total energy cost of paying a pack of gum with your Mastercard is probably on the order of running your computer for a few seconds. Maybe as much as a minute, I don't know to what degree the financial system uses replication.

[aplummer]

Less than the cost of the transaction fees + terminal and merchant fees amount of energy

[elefanten]

orders of magnitude less