We could, and it ends up being much less. Probably less overall for the entire banking system, and most definitely less per transaction than the horror of bitco

We could, and it ends up being much less. Probably less overall for the entire banking system, and most definitely less per transaction than the horror of bitcoin. I've been unable to find any rigorous research on this, but even the pieces defending bitcoin claim that the banking system consumes maybe 5 or 10 times as much energy as the bitcoin network, while neglecting to mention that the traditional banking system handle hundreds of thousands of times more transactions per second than bitcoin (especially funny since the estimates include stuff like the AC costs of bank branches - obvious sophistry).