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If anyone is interested, Visa reports that their payments network (and supporting infrastructure) uses 740,000 Gigajoules[0] in a year. Can’t quite find a one

If anyone is interested, Visa reports that their payments network (and supporting infrastructure) uses 740,000 Gigajoules[0] in a year. Can’t quite find a one for one measurement for Bitcoin, but due note this is the energy needs of all of Visa’s operations and they process in excess 100 billion transactions a year and Bitcoin (in 2020) averaged around 300,000 transactions a day[1]. If interested there is this[2] digiconomist article with more numbers (no clue as to the veracity of them). [0]: https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate-responsibility/visa-2019-corporate-responsibility-report.pdf https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate-responsibil.... [1]: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions [2]: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

enchiridion 5y ago
So let's do the rough math and figure out the comparison 300k per day is around 100 million transactions per year, three orders of magnitude less than Visa. BTC uses 110 terawatt hours per year right now[0], which is 396,000,000 gigajoules, a three order of magnitude difference in the other direction. Assuming everything scales nicely, if Bitcoin were the size of visa it would use ~6 orders of magnitude more energy. OK, so that is way worse than I thought. I'm still not sold on the idea that it's a bad thing, but it's nice to put numbers to the situation. [0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/hbr.org/amp/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actually-consume https://www.google.com/amp/s/hbr.org/amp/2021/05/how-much-en...