And plenty of bitcoin is not in circulation, but that is irrelevant. The comparison is between the ecological cost of mining bitcoin versus mining gold. Like g

And plenty of bitcoin is not in circulation, but that is irrelevant. The comparison is between the ecological cost of mining bitcoin versus mining gold. Like gold, bitcoin does not actually have to change hands to be used. If people deposit bitcoin into a virtual vault, they can exchange it with eachother all day long without anything being processed on the network. It's only when someone withdraws their bitcoin from that vault that they need to process a real transaction - equivalent to physically moving gold. The difference between bitcoin and gold is that the environmental costs of transferring value by gold increase with distance and quantity: it takes a lot more to ship a ton of gold around the world than handing a coin to a person next door. Bitcoin, on the other hand has a fixed cost - the transaction to buy a pizza is no different from the transaction to buy a pizzeria. Of course you're not going to wire a bitcoin to the local pizza boy, you're going to go through an intermediary that provides a lower cost transaction. You use bitcoin for the big transfers where it is competitive both financially and ecologically with transporting similar value in physical assets.