4 ms·

He also needs to do the calculation for credit cards, the banking industry and central banks, for comparison purposes.

• tedunangst 9y ago
  Going to go out on a limb here and predict credit cards have a better $/watt ratio than bitcoin.
  • slyfocks 9y ago
    According to a recent estimate, ~4000 times more energy intensive. It’s an incredible waste of resources for most current use cases. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ypkp3y/bitcoin-is-still-unsustainable https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ypkp3y/bitcoin-is...
    • rothbardrand 9y ago
      Silly. Comparing the entire infrastructure of bitcoin to just a tiny sliver of the credit infrastructure. You need to include on the other side, all the energy the employees use, the buildings, the gas in their cars, the computers they run, and all of this for the related companies and the like. Or you just look at the cost in energy of finding the one correct hash for that block-- which again is going to be two or three orders of magnitude less than a credit card swipe (and the communications systems it needs for an auth) Further, the cost per transaction in bitcoin a year from now will be about 1,000,000 times lower due to Lightening Network. I know there's a political desire to demonize bitcoin (this is vice, not exactly an objective source) and that ignoring one side of the equation to try and make bitcoin out to be an environmental evil seems the best approach you can get but its' absurd on its face.
      • rothbardrand 9y ago
        Downvotes galore but no counter arguments. Whatever bitter bunnies.