[Feeble]

> As a currency? I have that already. And its stable, accepted almost everywhere, doesn't waste tons of energy and cannot be lost by forgetting a password.

So you were born (or at least live) in a country that has a stable currency which is accepted almost everywhere, and you can trust your politicians to not undermine this currency by bad economic policies and/or creating very high inflation. Congratulations! However, a large part of earth's population do not enjoy this stability. For them crypto offers a way to store wealth that cannot be debased nor easily seized by authorities in bad faith.

Some estimates are that 2 billion adults do not even have banking.

You say your currency does not waste tons of energy. How much energy would you say the financial system in your country use in order to keep a sound ledger and enforce the monetary rules & policies?

Bitcoin uses less energy than the gold industry. And gold mines wreck the environment (https://earthworks.org/campaigns/no-dirty-gold/impacts/). But you don't hear much about that even though most gold is used as a store of wealth, much like Bitcoin is.

Energy usage should also not be equated to bad energy production, though of course miners can use bad energy source instead of sustainable energy.

[Nursie]

> How much energy would you say the financial system in your country...

This is trivial to calculate. BTC alone uses more power than a number of mid-sized countries, like New Zealand. New Zealand, who run their own financial systems, payment networks, banks, insurance, industry, agriculture and .. well just an entire country off less power, providing more services to more people and higher transaction throughput while they're at it too.

(NZ's payment card transaction rate appears to be an average of around 550 per second.)

[Feeble]

Sure, but BTC is global so you need to divide BTC's energy usage with the population of New Zealand to make a fair comparison.

New Zealand's population is 0.06% of the world population. Best guess of Bitcoin energy usage put it at around 100 TWh so New Zealands part would be 0.06 TWh.

So I think we should really compare pro rate BTC usage of 0.06 TWh against NZ's 40 TWh. I have no idea how much of NZ's usage is spent on financial system though.

[Nursie]

The question was how much does the financial system in your country use. So I picked a country to show an example. You then changed the question

> but BTC is global

So what? It supports fewer transactions per second, by a factor of almost 100, than NZ's system uses, it doesn't provide anywhere near the range of services, financial or otherwise, and it burns more power. It's a great comparison as it is. BTC is power-hungry and comparatively low-capability.

[Feeble]

> The question was how much does the financial system in your country use. So I picked a country to show an example. You then changed the question

Not really. I am saying consider that energy usage for traditional banking is also high. If you compare numbers then I believe it needs to be global or pro rata.

> It supports fewer transactions per second

I don't think this is a relevant comparison to be honest. The high energy usage of Bitcoin is not to handle transaction volume, but to secure the network and funds.

Payment cards is a secondary payment layer on top of the banking settlements. Bitcoin is more equivalent to bank settlements.

Second layer solutions for Bitcoin such as Bitcoin Lightning and crypto payment cards (Crypto.com, Coinbase etc) are more comparative to bank settled payment cards and can (and does) provide much higher transaction volumes for Bitcoin. Which also means that payment card energy usage should not be included in any comparison if done (imho).

Just as a side-note, Christmas lights in US used more energy than Bitcoin miners (at least a couple of years ago) and for sure more than a lot of countries. Bitcoin provides sound money for unbanked people all over the world. What would you rather have?

[Nursie]

> Bitcoin provides sound money for unbanked people all over the world

LOL, no, it does not. It does nothing at all for the unbanked.

[pjc50]

The "stability" argument doesn't work when the value of bitcoin can fall against the dollar by 10-20% quite frequently. People love it because it's mostly been volatile in the "up" direction, but in terms of price stability of goods and services it's terrible.

[RedBeetDeadpool]

But in terms of price stability as a fraction of the sum, its unrivaled.

Things are still very early so people don't know what to make of it, but stable is a not a property I would assign to the dollar. Given that one economy mutates and another doesn't, you have to realize its not bitcoin thats moving against the dollar. Its the dollar moving around the bitcoin.

[ben_w]

If the dollar was unstable and and bitcoin stable, I would expect to observe the exchange rate between USD and other currencies fluctuate wildly while at the same time observing the BTC-$other exchange rate not fluctuating much.

This is not what I see. USD with the various other currencies I tried had 1-10% variation in the last 12 months. In each of those currencies, bitcoin varied by about 300%.

Even gold, which has zoomed up this millennium, makes bitcoin look stable in comparison.

Can you name any non-crypto asset that has had an approximately constant price in bitcoin?

[Feeble]

Yes that's fair point. It is not very ideal if you want a USD or EUR stable store of wealth at this point.

[usrbinbash]

>and you can trust your politicians to not undermine this currency by bad economic policies and/or creating very high inflation. Congratulations! However, a large part of earth's population do not enjoy this stability.

And how do cryptocurrencies, fluctuating between extremes of overblown worth and deep falls at a whim solve this problem exactly?

>For them crypto offers a way to store wealth

No they don't, because the tokens by themselves are worthless, as they do not enjoy a backing entity (like real currencies) and have no intrinsic worth (like gold). Since their entire worth depends on what others are willing to pay, "crypto" is, and always will be, a null-sum-game...for every penny someone makes, someone else has to lose one.

>How much energy would you say the financial system in your country use in order to keep a sound ledger and enforce the monetary rules & policies?

I know that BTC uses up the energy equivalent of an entire nation like New Zealand. So this single crypto currency alone requires as much power as a country, which has a banking system, communications infrastructure, public services, hotels, supermarkets, street lights, air conditioned homes, foundries, factories, agriculture and transportation.

So no, I do not need to know how much energy my country spends on its banking system energy-wise to say with absolute certainty that it's orders of magnitude less than "crypto".

>Bitcoin uses less energy than the gold industry

The "gold industry" excavates, cleans and prepares a resource that has widespread applications in electronics, metallurgy and science. The device you wrote your post on most likely has gold inside it, as do most electronics we use on a daily basis.

So other than "crypto", this industry thus produces something of ACTUAL, TANGIBLE AND INTRINSIC WORTH.

>Energy usage should also not be equated to bad energy production

Yes it should, because every KWh wasted on "crypto" is energy not available elsewhere. If we took the energy equivalent wasted on it, and used it to power de-salination plants, we could probably provide clean drinking water to hundreds of millions of people.