[celticninja]

first of all perfectly secure systems do not exist. but lets say for a minute you mean visa or mastercard are perfectly secure, do you think that the electricity use of the bitcoin network exceeds the electricity use of VISA all over the world? They run their own always on computer network and offices, which need people and computers that require electricity to be able to function properly. Then factor in that this is repeated in almost every country they operate in, sometimes more than once depending on the size of the country. So the electricity use of bitcoin is just a drop int he ocean compared to what the current banking industry uses.

[betterunix]

"do you think that the electricity use of the bitcoin network exceeds the electricity use of VISA all over the world?"

That is the wrong comparison. The right comparison is this: does Bitcoin require more electrical energy per transaction than VISA?

If the answer is not "yes" today, it will eventually be "yes." Here is a thought experiment:

Suppose that a new technology is developed that halves the energy required to process a VISA transaction and check for fraud. VISA has every incentive to adopt that technology, and thus reduce its power consumption.

Now suppose that a new technology halves the energy required to process Bitcoin transactions i.e. to compute hashes. Since miners profit by computing more blocks, their incentive is to adopt the new technology, compute hashes at twice the rate, and their net power consumption remains constant.

[celticninja]

I concur.

However Visa has no incentive to search formore efficient technologies where are you in bitcoin my name is constantly being developed to become more efficient and it isn't necessarily the number ofhashes you are getting but thenumber of hashes you get per watt of electricity used. so the incentive is there for minors always, this is not the case with visa

apologies for paul wording Ion phone