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I wonder what's the energy consumption of an average credit card transaction (including keeping the infrastructure, charge backs etc.)...
by hdhzy 9y ago
I wonder what's the energy consumption of an average credit card transaction (including keeping the infrastructure, charge backs etc.)...
- _Marak_ 9y agoFrom the article: VISA Network Statistics VISA's estimated annual electricity consumption (TWh) 0.54 Number of U.S. households that could be powered by VISA 50,000 Electricity consumed per transaction (KWh) 0.00651 Number of seconds the electricity consumed by 1 VISA transaction could power 1 U.S. household 19 Number of VISA transactions that could be powered with the electricity consumed by 1 Bitcoin transaction 20,983 `
- Rmilb 9y agoA decentralized network has trade offs associated with it.
- runeks 9y agoThe more important point is that VISA is broken by design. Every day hackers steal credit card info and leech millions from the system, which is included in the fee you pay. The only reason it keeps working is because hackers aren't sufficiently sophisticated yet. The solution, of course, is to store a private key on a hardware device, not have the private key be 16+3 decimal digits and an expiration date.
- UncleMeat 9y agoThat is entirely unrelated to a decentralized or centralized design. One could build a centralized CC network where we don't need to transmit credentials to third parties in order to make purchases.
- bo1024 9y agoI agree with you, but this is in principle a separate issue. We would like to aim for a system that has both the security of Bitcoin AND the "efficiency" of, in this example, VISA.
- runeks 9y agoThat would be great, but what if such a system doesn't exist? Pointing out inefficiencies in Bitcoin isn't very useful when no alternative exists to reach the same level of decentralization.