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by NoOn3 410 days ago
If you think about it deeply, it's still not entirely clear who consumes more energy: the traditional banking sector and servicing of visa, mastercard, etc. cards, or cryptocurrency technologies. At least it seems to me that the difference is not that big.
3 comments

Except that the traditional banking sector does much more than cryptocurrencies do. Bitcoin still runs only around 5-7 transactions per seconds - several orders of magnitude less than Visa alone.

https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/transactions-per-... https://crypto.com/en/university/blockchain-scalability

At least banking I believe if someone went out and said we could save 100 million on energy cost by spending 10 million. They would at least consider doing it, if it looked realistic enough.

On other hand efficiency for BTC mining does not matter. The energy expenditure always approaches the value of mined coins. When efficiency increase same energy is spend just to do more hashes, which are really not useful.

> At least it seems to me that the difference is not that big.

in total? or per transaction?

How many transaction BTC makes compared to Visa/Mastercard/bank transfers?