> According to VISA corporate responsibility and sustainability report in 2017, the company consumed a total amount of 680,560 GigaJoules of energy globally for all its operations (1). We also know VISA processed 111.2 billion transactions in 2017 (2). Rely on these numbers, VISA ECPT is 0.0017 kilowatt-hours and for simplification 100,000 VISA transactions consume 170 kWh.
680,000 GJ is roughly 190GWh (0.1%).
But it gets worse. In 2017 Visa executed ~111B transactions. Bitcoin peaks at about ~90M. So 1000x the energy for 1/1000 of the transaction volume. So each Bitcoin transaction uses ~1,000,000 times the energy of a Visa transaction.
> According to VISA corporate responsibility and sustainability report in 2017, the company consumed a total amount of 680,560 GigaJoules of energy globally for all its operations (1). We also know VISA processed 111.2 billion transactions in 2017 (2). Rely on these numbers, VISA ECPT is 0.0017 kilowatt-hours and for simplification 100,000 VISA transactions consume 170 kWh.
680,000 GJ is roughly 190GWh (0.1%).
But it gets worse. In 2017 Visa executed ~111B transactions. Bitcoin peaks at about ~90M. So 1000x the energy for 1/1000 of the transaction volume. So each Bitcoin transaction uses ~1,000,000 times the energy of a Visa transaction.
[1]: https://medium.com/@a.abbaszadeh.s/measuring-iota-pow-s-ener...