[quandrum]

There's also the fact all the power draw of the traditional banking industry is also in the crypto and not accounted for in this analysis.

Crypto still needs POS systems and accounts and large staffs in large offices and all the trappings of finance outside of mining.

[digging]

That's an excellent point actually. In the current day, more-or-less every watt of crypto is actually on top of the traditional financial system and totally reliant on it.

That's not intrinsic to cryptocurrency, but it is part of the reality we're living in, which is what I want people to be looking at.

[kkielhofner]

Precisely. I don't know how people can argue crypto power consumption against the banking industry when you can drive down main street in any city and pass 15 bank branches and see ATMs every 100ft.

Bank of America alone has 69m customers and real people have real needs - things like going to a branch occasionally, calling customer service, taking out cash, etc. Not only is BoA itself larger in terms of users than all of crypto (I've done the analysis, checked block explorers, etc) it's actually usable by real people in the real world for real activity that contributes to the real economy and actually provides value and utility other than pancake swapping your doodle coins for poodle coins.

[acdha]

That comparison is also interesting because the same people who make those comparisons are also perpetually perplexed about why statistically nobody uses Bitcoin, and it’s like … BofA employs thousands of MBAs, they have McKinsey consultants, so you really think they’d have all of those employees and infrastructure cutting into their profit margins if their customers didn’t find those services useful? Focusing on the transaction mechanism is leaving out 95% of banking.