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> There's no other transaction that happens as part of paying with VISA other than the monthly bill. I respectfully disagree. There are many many transactions
by lojack 9y ago
> There's no other transaction that happens as part of paying with VISA other than the monthly bill.
I respectfully disagree. There are many many transactions that happen behind the scenes when you're paying with a Visa card. All transactions go through a merchant bank before ever being sent to Visa, and they may even go through a second third party. Additionally there's a number of times in which clearing and settlement occurs, both on the merchant side and on the "monthly bill" part that you discounted as irrelevant.
This all takes energy, the POS takes energy, the banks all require energy to process transactions, it takes energy to send out statements, to pay your bill. I have no clue if this entire process takes more energy than Bitcoin or not, but I can guarantee the cost of doing a transaction through Visa isn't glaringly obvious.
- kllrnohj 9y agoThe number calculated for VISA's power/transaction was arrived at by taking the entire power consumption of VISA's data-centers and dividing by the number of transactions. Far from a perfect number and you're correct it won't cover payment processors, but it's also picking up non-trivial amounts of other stuff since those data centers don't do exclusively payment processing. But either way you wouldn't count the POS. The POS is still there consuming the same amount of power if you pay with BTC, VISA, or cash.
- lojack 9y agoAnother problem with those numbers is that its a two sided transaction, and Visa data centers only account for one side of the transaction. It also doesn't account for any clearing houses external to Visa.