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How much energy do you think the current financial system consumes? Eg paying for a pack of gum with your Mastercard Edit: This wasn't intended to be a hypothe

How much energy do you think the current financial system consumes? Eg paying for a pack of gum with your Mastercard Edit: This wasn't intended to be a hypothetical- I agree BTC uses significantly more per transaction, but I'm curious how it compares to the entirety of a system like Mastercard divided by number of transactions (including all employee/office space/commute/etc energy consumption). There are clearer/fewer inputs for Bitcoin for sure but that doesn't mean we shouldn't account for the total environmental cost of a behemoth like Mastercard. Bitcoin can never and should never replace our current payments network as it simply cannot scale in its current form. But, I do think people simply look at the cost to run the technology itself and assume that's the total environmental cost of a system.

elefanten 6y ago
orders of magnitude less
jpsalm 6y ago
Significantly less energy per transaction, which is the only metric that matters.
- zadler 6y ago
  Lightning network will also scale to millions of transactions per second and consume much less than each Bitcoin transaction.
  - jpsalm 6y ago
    Yes, non-blockchain transactions are much more efficient. But then what's the point of using blockchain if transactions happen off-chain?
aplummer 6y ago
Less than the cost of the transaction fees + terminal and merchant fees amount of energy
jcranmer 6y ago
The total energy cost of paying a pack of gum with your Mastercard is probably on the order of running your computer for a few seconds. Maybe as much as a minute, I don't know to what degree the financial system uses replication.
yunesj 6y ago
> I'm curious how it compares to the entirety of a system like Mastercard You should also include the cost of running all of the world's central banks. US Federal Reserve budget is about $5B. Assuming 328.5k BTC mined per year, no tx fees, $20k BTC value, and mining at break even, mining energy costs are about $6.57B. It seems like they're on the same order of magnitude. I am more concerned about the misaligned incentives for PoW, and to a lesser extent for PoS.

elefanten 6y ago

orders of magnitude less

jpsalm 6y ago

Significantly less energy per transaction, which is the only metric that matters.

zadler 6y ago
Lightning network will also scale to millions of transactions per second and consume much less than each Bitcoin transaction.
- jpsalm 6y ago
  Yes, non-blockchain transactions are much more efficient. But then what's the point of using blockchain if transactions happen off-chain?

aplummer 6y ago

Less than the cost of the transaction fees + terminal and merchant fees amount of energy

jcranmer 6y ago

The total energy cost of paying a pack of gum with your Mastercard is probably on the order of running your computer for a few seconds. Maybe as much as a minute, I don't know to what degree the financial system uses replication.

yunesj 6y ago

> I'm curious how it compares to the entirety of a system like Mastercard You should also include the cost of running all of the world's central banks. US Federal Reserve budget is about $5B. Assuming 328.5k BTC mined per year, no tx fees, $20k BTC value, and mining at break even, mining energy costs are about $6.57B. It seems like they're on the same order of magnitude. I am more concerned about the misaligned incentives for PoW, and to a lesser extent for PoS.