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+ energy. Yes, traditional banking requires energy, too, but not nearly as much per transaction/person.
by carlmr 6y ago
+ energy. Yes, traditional banking requires energy, too, but not nearly as much per transaction/person.
- dralley 6y ago"Not nearly as much" is quite an understatement. The factor is something like 350,000x more energy required for a bitcoin transaction vs. a transaction on the traditional banking network.
- doggosphere 6y agoCitation?
- carlmr 6y agoI didn't post it, but statista [1] says it's 741kWh for one bitcoin transaction vs. 149kWh for 100.000 visa transactions. That's a factor of 741/149 * 100,000 ≈ 497,000. Of course visa is not the whole banking system, but it seems as it would be roughly comparable. What I find horrific about this is that you can power your apartment for a year for the energy consumption of two bitcoin transactions. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-consumption-transaction-comparison-visa/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-co...
- londons_explore 6y agoIt's an example of "arbitrary effort wasted for a bigger slice of a fixed size pie". An equivalent would be advertising for the US election. If all parties cut their ad budgets by a factor of 10, the result would likely be the same. Yet they all "waste" their ad budgets on yard signs simply to get a bigger share of the vote, and they have to because their competitors do too.
- carlmr 6y agoI understand that, but this doesn't make it better. The max effort you put in is proportional too how much bitcoin is valued, so if more people use it and the value goes up, the energy requirements rise as well.