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"Lost energy usage data aside, the report also concluded that Visa, MasterCard and American Express credit card transactions used less than 1 percent of the tot
by docmechanic 4y ago
"Lost energy usage data aside, the report also concluded that Visa, MasterCard and American Express credit card transactions used less than 1 percent of the total energy that Bitcoin and Ethereum have consumed over the course of a year "despite [card issuers] processing many times the number of on-chain transactions."
- bob1029 4y agoLast I checked, it takes somewhere around 700-2000 kilowatt-hours to settle a bitcoin transaction. This is a lot of energy. Instead of doing that, you could have ran a top-spec IBM Z-series mainframe for at least a day (30kW consumption). Imagine how many credit card transactions you could process in 24 hours on such a machine. (hint: it's all of them) BTC is like 7-8 orders of magnitude worse than big finance when it comes to energy/carbon footprint.
- docmechanic 4y ago+1
- ashwagary 4y agoThose numbers are long outdated thanks to the lightning network and tap root. What seems to be a single onchain BTC transaction could easily actually be a batch of 1+ million transactions being settled in one tx.