4 ms·
You must also consider the cost of storing, moving and exchanging, and guaranteeing the currency. Printing on its own is useless. How many mainframes keep trac
by Anderkent 9y ago
You must also consider the cost of storing, moving and exchanging, and guaranteeing the currency. Printing on its own is useless.
How many mainframes keep track of money at banks? How much paper is used for ledgers? What % of internet traffic is about moving money? How many vans of cash move through cities to fill ATMs?
- beat 9y agoSome years ago, I worked at the Federal Reserve, on a system that moved $100B (billion!) a DAY, on a pretty reasonable server farm. Yes, there's a fair bit of energy committed to the existing financial system, but it's moving far, far more actual value with many orders of magnitude more actual exchanges than bitcoin is going.
- VMG 9y agoThe Federal Reserve is doing something completely different than Bitcoin is doing.
- beat 9y agoYeah. It's providing a useful, widely accepted, and stable currency. But I'm addressing the argument that the energy consumption for bitcoin mining and the energy consumption of the mainstream financial system is directly comparable (they're not).