[crazygringo]

From the article:

> According to the Web site Digiconomist, a single bitcoin transaction uses the same amount of power that the average American household consumes in a month, and is responsible for roughly a million times more carbon emissions than a single Visa transaction.

How can you justify that as a cost worth paying? A month's worth of electricity for a single transaction?

It doesn't matter what you do with taxes or renewables. That's insane.

[remolacha]

It's a misleading comparison. They are comparing the cost of an on-chain Bitcoin transaction to the immediate energy cost of a Visa transaction. On average, one on-chain Bitcoin transaction corresponds to 1000s of total transactions, since most transactions occur through L2s like exchanges, the lightning network, or PayPal. This L2 activity is written to chain batchwise, and only when necessary. And the article doesn't calculate the true total cost of running the Visa network, which also involves 10s of thousands of Visa employees and facilities, not to mention the energy consumed by the Federal Reserve in minting and recycling physical money, and preventing fraud and counterfeiting.

[jonny_eh]

> preventing fraud and counterfeiting

Bitcoin doesn't have that as a feature, so it's not fair to count that against fiat money.