[biot]

How is that different for bitcoin? Accepting bitcoin payments for purchases still requires datacenters as well as support, sales, and marketing staff given that the products/services being sold don't automagically market, sell, and support themselves just because you accept bitcoin. It might even be worse as a transaction needs to be verified by the rest of the network, not just by a single authority.

[neals]

Bitcoin would work perfectly well without datacenters. The client is all you need, you can run it on your computer.

I'm talking about the people from VISA that have to store and maintain accountholders data. None of this exists for Bitcoin.

[biot]

Each bitcoin transaction needs to be verified by a majority of the network in order to mitigate the risk of a fraudulent transaction. Does the energy required to do this exceed Visa's per-transaction energy requirements?