| Bitcoin is in the same league as all datacenters in the world combined. Datacenters use about 205 TWh/year. https://www.networkworld.com/article/3531316/data-center-pow... Bitcoin uses about 75 TWh/year. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption Visa operates out of just two datacenters. They are famously secretive about their operations so I don't know how much power they use. The most I've found is that they have 'multi-megawatt' datacenters, which means they probably use more than three megawatts and less than 100. https://youtu.be/fpmS0JYyCGs?t=66 Bitcoin uses about 8.5 gigawatts. Clearly it uses at least a few orders of magnitude more electricity than Visa. It can process four transactions per second compared to about 25,000 for Visa, so the energy per transaction is even worse by a few more orders of magnitude. The inefficiency of Bitcoin is truly mind-boggling. If I were trying to write a hit piece, I wouldn't have the guts to make up numbers as bad as the reality. |
Also, some currencies like Ethereum are moving to proof of stake, which requires less energy.