VISA wouldn't exist without banks. It wouldn't exist without the whole hierarchy of contracts and licenses that allow transactions across borders. Bitcoin has a

VISA wouldn't exist without banks. It wouldn't exist without the whole hierarchy of contracts and licenses that allow transactions across borders. Bitcoin has all of that solved by the protocol itself, so yes, comparing VISA to Bitcoin is very much skewed, VISA is doing just a very small part of what Bitcoin can do. Maybe comparing Lightning Network to VISA would be a bit better, but still not completely fair, because lightning is independent of central authorities. But the second important point of the article is that the sources who say that "Bitcoin has an energy problem" usually come to that conclusion by taking average electricity price and multiplying it by total Bitcoin network hashrate. They (intentionally?) omit the fact that Bitcoin mining is by design just barely profitable. The difficulty rebalances itself according to the Bitcoin price, energy price and number of miners. That means that for the miner mining bitcoin was probably the better alternative use for that energy in that particular situation. If it wasn't, other people would have used the energy for something else (more needed/more profitable/..) and the miner would be priced out of the market - and that would be totally ok for the Bitcoin network, that's the design. Yet another point is that currently the mining is still subsidized by the issuance of new Bitcoins, which is still higher than the transaction fees. But that will soon stop being the case, quite likely within the next 4 years. When miners are motivated primarily by fees, then the economic pressure will force them to reject small-fee transactions and that will move Bitcoin on-chain transactions to similar position as the international fiat settlements. Coffee will be paid with lightning, on-chain will settle big blocks of transactions worth millions of dollars, where a $100 fee is no problem, and the overall energy use of the whole network won't rise any more - exactly as designed.