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Yea but a whole fraud department of humans emits a ton of carbon. There's no way the banking and finance industry doesn't compete emissions wise with bitcoin.

roywiggins 6y ago
Fraud departments provide a pretty useful service to consumers. The existing finance system is so much larger than the Bitcoin economy that it's no surprise if they, in total, rival Bitcoin in energy intensity. It processes orders of magnitude more transactions and provides other services that people use that have no Bitcoin equivalents. This isn't a defense of the modern financial system, which is arguably a trash fire for plenty of reasons, but of course it's fairly energy intensive. It's massive. If it were replaced entirely by Bitcoin, it would be even more intensive.
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Barrin92 6y ago
>There's no way the banking and finance industry doesn't compete emissions wise with bitcoin not on a per transaction basis, which is the only relevant measure because the banking system supports a lot more people than bitcoin does. A single bitcoin transaction uses 610.20 kWh right now, which is comparable to the energy consumption of an average US household over 20 days.[1] Also for a comparison of scope, Tenpay, Tencents payment service processes about 1.2 billion transactions per day, Bitcoin does about 300k. If all financial transactions conducted in China alone would consume the amount of energy that a bitcoin transaction does, it would roughly eclipse the energy the country consumes in a year, in one day. [1]https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
- johnisgood 6y ago
  I cannot wait for nuclear fusion to finally be here so people will stop worrying about the electricity consumption, and high consumption will not mean pollution or whatever.
  - carlob 6y ago
    Pretty sure the difficulty will go up accordingly then
  - jodrellblank 6y ago
    All the electricity we generate becomes waste heat in the atmoshpere. Global energy use is currently ~0.1% of Sun power hitting the Earth. USA uses ~10x more electricity per person than India does, assume bringing everyone up to USA levels means we'll be around 1% of Sun power. Grow the population from ~8Bn to predicted ~12Bn and we'll be around 1.5%. And then everyone gets "too cheap to meter" fusion power? There is not a /lot/ of headroom there, we surely can't go to outputting as much waste heat again as the planet gets from The Sun - and before you say "solar", you already said "fusion".
    - mlonkibjuyhv 6y ago
      Energy usage will explode! Imagine all the ways to use energy that hasn't been economically viable before. I think the only way that will work out, is if the energy consumption happens off-planet.
- monadic2 6y ago
  Yea, after reading more I got a sense of the scale. Still, I think that's the proper comparison—human processes are the analogue to keeping a blockchain online and mining.
  - cedilla 6y ago
    The difference is that there's no mechanism in banking that keeps ramping up the difficulty exponentially. All the energy in bitcoin is not wasted on keeping and organizing that tiny ledger (barely 300 GB of data!), it's wasted on brute forcing hashes, with the energy required ramping up exponentially with interest in bitcoin. As ingenious as bitcoin is, that is a fatal flaw. Using bitcoin is like rolling coal, only worse for the environment.

roywiggins 6y ago

Fraud departments provide a pretty useful service to consumers. The existing finance system is so much larger than the Bitcoin economy that it's no surprise if they, in total, rival Bitcoin in energy intensity. It processes orders of magnitude more transactions and provides other services that people use that have no Bitcoin equivalents. This isn't a defense of the modern financial system, which is arguably a trash fire for plenty of reasons, but of course it's fairly energy intensive. It's massive. If it were replaced entirely by Bitcoin, it would be even more intensive.

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Barrin92 6y ago

>There's no way the banking and finance industry doesn't compete emissions wise with bitcoin not on a per transaction basis, which is the only relevant measure because the banking system supports a lot more people than bitcoin does. A single bitcoin transaction uses 610.20 kWh right now, which is comparable to the energy consumption of an average US household over 20 days.[1] Also for a comparison of scope, Tenpay, Tencents payment service processes about 1.2 billion transactions per day, Bitcoin does about 300k. If all financial transactions conducted in China alone would consume the amount of energy that a bitcoin transaction does, it would roughly eclipse the energy the country consumes in a year, in one day. [1]https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

johnisgood 6y ago
I cannot wait for nuclear fusion to finally be here so people will stop worrying about the electricity consumption, and high consumption will not mean pollution or whatever.
- carlob 6y ago
  Pretty sure the difficulty will go up accordingly then
- jodrellblank 6y ago
  All the electricity we generate becomes waste heat in the atmoshpere. Global energy use is currently ~0.1% of Sun power hitting the Earth. USA uses ~10x more electricity per person than India does, assume bringing everyone up to USA levels means we'll be around 1% of Sun power. Grow the population from ~8Bn to predicted ~12Bn and we'll be around 1.5%. And then everyone gets "too cheap to meter" fusion power? There is not a /lot/ of headroom there, we surely can't go to outputting as much waste heat again as the planet gets from The Sun - and before you say "solar", you already said "fusion".
  - mlonkibjuyhv 6y ago
    Energy usage will explode! Imagine all the ways to use energy that hasn't been economically viable before. I think the only way that will work out, is if the energy consumption happens off-planet.
monadic2 6y ago
Yea, after reading more I got a sense of the scale. Still, I think that's the proper comparison—human processes are the analogue to keeping a blockchain online and mining.
- cedilla 6y ago
  The difference is that there's no mechanism in banking that keeps ramping up the difficulty exponentially. All the energy in bitcoin is not wasted on keeping and organizing that tiny ledger (barely 300 GB of data!), it's wasted on brute forcing hashes, with the energy required ramping up exponentially with interest in bitcoin. As ingenious as bitcoin is, that is a fatal flaw. Using bitcoin is like rolling coal, only worse for the environment.