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Visa used 189GWh in 2017, worldwide, of which around half was data centres [1]. That handled 111.2 billion transactions, so about 1.7Wh per transaction (half fo

Visa used 189GWh in 2017, worldwide, of which around half was data centres [1]. That handled 111.2 billion transactions, so about 1.7Wh per transaction (half for datacentres). Bitcoin used 844670Wh per transaction [2]. [1] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate-responsibility/visa-2017-corporate-responsibility-report.pdf https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate-responsibil... [2] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

qqqwerty 3y ago
That is bonkers if true. To put some context around that, our EV can drive around 4000 miles on that amount of energy. Meanwhile, I am not sure you could even unlock the car on 1.7Wh.
- danbruc 3y ago
  1.7 Wh is 1,000 W for 6 seconds, I really hope that this is enough to unlock a car.
- manquer 3y ago
  Why is it bonkers ? Bitcoins are just speculative assets . All crypto is, nobody is actually doing real economic transactions on them, I.e buying and selling services/goods for bitcoin. It is not practical to do so with transaction/gas fees . If you think of it as an Asset transactions then it makes sense, those are always expensive. A real estate deal for a house will have buyer agent, seller agent government taxes etc easily 5-10% , if you sell an artwork a gallery will probably charge upwards of 10-20% etc.
  - qqqwerty 3y ago
    A digital currency using ~844 kWh per transaction is absolutely bonkers. This is irrespective of any fees, taxes, or commissions associated with the transaction. If I buy real estate with bitcoin, all of those would still apply, but my choice of using bitcoin would result in an extra 844 kWh of energy consumed compared to using cash. Bonkers.
    - manquer 3y ago
      Digital asset, not currency. That is the key difference, asset transfers being expensive(in transaction fees) is not abnormal. I don't like it, I don't support this industry, it is still big waste of energy, however if you see it from a lens of asset instead of currency then it kind of make sense that transactions are expensive. Money has four functions traditionally, Bitcoin does not work for three of them: medium of exchange(too expensive), unit of account(too volatile), standard of deferred payment (too volatile), it kind of works as "store of value", i.e asset despite the volatility as the deflationary pressure due to its by design purchasing power increases. Smarter economists can explain it better than me, my point is, don't think of it as a currency, it is really not, just an asset class ( still wasteful).
amarant 3y ago
This is the relevant comparison! In another comment I asserted that I would be surprised if Blockchain doesn't use at least 2 orders of magnitude more energy per transaction than traditional banking. Seems I was off by about 5 orders of magnitude, in Blockchains favour!
- FabHK 3y ago
  Traditional banking also does a lot more than what BTC does. BTC is about 9 orders of magnitude less efficient than the effective work it does. Look, you can run a full Bitcoin node on a Macbook that uses 20W. It can easily verify 5 transactions per second, put them into a block, and compute the hash of it, and do some network communications. The actual network uses 20GW, a billion times more energy, because they have thousands of nodes replicate the same work and then add PoW as a cherry on top.
lottin 3y ago
And it's worse. Bitcoin doesn't even work. Imagine paying with bitcoins at the grocery store.
- nmz 3y ago
  Imagine losing your phone which has all of your coins.
tgv 3y ago
I imagine much of Visa's data centre capacity goes to serving web pages and all that. I know of a bank that would run millions of transactions per day in a couple of hours on an IBM mainframe (at night, after closing). While they are power hungry machines, I can't imagine them using 1MW. So I think 1.7Wh per transaction is at least an order of magnitude too high.
rlpb 3y ago
Visa's count presumably relates to direct consumer small value transactions though, whereas Bitcoin transactions are typically much larger "clearing" transactions. If Bitcoin is scaled up, that would be the only option - each transaction would be a clearing transaction incorporating many individual consumer transaction movements.
- qeternity 3y ago
  This is an argument _against_ Bitcoin.
mandibles 3y ago
Ah, the old Visa vs Bitcoin comparison. It was wrong when it was first made in 2009, and it's wrong now. 1. Bitcoin is a final settlement system, akin to moving gold bars from one vault to another. It achieves this settlement in minutes and requires no trusted intermediaries. 2. Bitcoin's energy consumption is a function of price, not of transaction throughput, so the two are orthogonal.
- Symbiote 3y ago
  You have almost 6 orders of magnitude available to make the comparison with whatever transaction method you prefer. You could fly gold bars around in small planes, and it would still be more efficient than Bitcoin.
  - jakupovic 3y ago
    What if we have to account for all the bankers and their houses and cars and everything they need to live to continue our current financial order? People focus on simple math, but bitcoin doesnt need all the people to sign the docs and keep track of them, that's the catch.
    - qqqwerty 3y ago
      Bitcoin isn't replacing any of them, so it's a moot point. If someone wants to buy real estate using bitcoin they are still probably going to use a realtor (or at the very least a lawyer) and they still probably need a mortgage, title insurance, and home insurance. If a company wants to go public, there is still going to be an army of i-bankers involved, even in a bitcoin denominated world. The banking sector exists for a reason. There are certainly parts of it that are superfluous and excessive, but someone somewhere is willingly paying for that excess, and that won't change under a bitcoin regime. And I personally think that most of the excess is due to excessive speculative activity in our financial system, and if anything, bitcoin seems like it will make that part worse.
null0pointer 3y ago
Bitcoin’s transaction throughput is artificially limited (hamstrung) and so not a useful denominator for comparisons. In theory it’s possible for a Bitcoin-like blockchain to record all of Visa’s transactions in a single giga-block with only a single mining hash attempt. Transaction throughput is not meaningful here.
- rspeele 3y ago
  It's meaningful since Bitcoin is the most popular, most energy-consuming crypto and it has this limitation, with no plans of changing. "Well, it's supposed to suck like that" doesn't change that Bitcoin is consuming tremendous amounts of energy to serve very, very few customers.

qqqwerty 3y ago

That is bonkers if true. To put some context around that, our EV can drive around 4000 miles on that amount of energy. Meanwhile, I am not sure you could even unlock the car on 1.7Wh.

danbruc 3y ago
1.7 Wh is 1,000 W for 6 seconds, I really hope that this is enough to unlock a car.
manquer 3y ago
Why is it bonkers ? Bitcoins are just speculative assets . All crypto is, nobody is actually doing real economic transactions on them, I.e buying and selling services/goods for bitcoin. It is not practical to do so with transaction/gas fees . If you think of it as an Asset transactions then it makes sense, those are always expensive. A real estate deal for a house will have buyer agent, seller agent government taxes etc easily 5-10% , if you sell an artwork a gallery will probably charge upwards of 10-20% etc.
- qqqwerty 3y ago
  A digital currency using ~844 kWh per transaction is absolutely bonkers. This is irrespective of any fees, taxes, or commissions associated with the transaction. If I buy real estate with bitcoin, all of those would still apply, but my choice of using bitcoin would result in an extra 844 kWh of energy consumed compared to using cash. Bonkers.
  - manquer 3y ago
    Digital asset, not currency. That is the key difference, asset transfers being expensive(in transaction fees) is not abnormal. I don't like it, I don't support this industry, it is still big waste of energy, however if you see it from a lens of asset instead of currency then it kind of make sense that transactions are expensive. Money has four functions traditionally, Bitcoin does not work for three of them: medium of exchange(too expensive), unit of account(too volatile), standard of deferred payment (too volatile), it kind of works as "store of value", i.e asset despite the volatility as the deflationary pressure due to its by design purchasing power increases. Smarter economists can explain it better than me, my point is, don't think of it as a currency, it is really not, just an asset class ( still wasteful).

amarant 3y ago

This is the relevant comparison! In another comment I asserted that I would be surprised if Blockchain doesn't use at least 2 orders of magnitude more energy per transaction than traditional banking. Seems I was off by about 5 orders of magnitude, in Blockchains favour!

FabHK 3y ago
Traditional banking also does a lot more than what BTC does. BTC is about 9 orders of magnitude less efficient than the effective work it does. Look, you can run a full Bitcoin node on a Macbook that uses 20W. It can easily verify 5 transactions per second, put them into a block, and compute the hash of it, and do some network communications. The actual network uses 20GW, a billion times more energy, because they have thousands of nodes replicate the same work and then add PoW as a cherry on top.

lottin 3y ago

And it's worse. Bitcoin doesn't even work. Imagine paying with bitcoins at the grocery store.

nmz 3y ago
Imagine losing your phone which has all of your coins.

tgv 3y ago

I imagine much of Visa's data centre capacity goes to serving web pages and all that. I know of a bank that would run millions of transactions per day in a couple of hours on an IBM mainframe (at night, after closing). While they are power hungry machines, I can't imagine them using 1MW. So I think 1.7Wh per transaction is at least an order of magnitude too high.

rlpb 3y ago

Visa's count presumably relates to direct consumer small value transactions though, whereas Bitcoin transactions are typically much larger "clearing" transactions. If Bitcoin is scaled up, that would be the only option - each transaction would be a clearing transaction incorporating many individual consumer transaction movements.

qeternity 3y ago
This is an argument _against_ Bitcoin.

mandibles 3y ago

Ah, the old Visa vs Bitcoin comparison. It was wrong when it was first made in 2009, and it's wrong now. 1. Bitcoin is a final settlement system, akin to moving gold bars from one vault to another. It achieves this settlement in minutes and requires no trusted intermediaries. 2. Bitcoin's energy consumption is a function of price, not of transaction throughput, so the two are orthogonal.

Symbiote 3y ago
You have almost 6 orders of magnitude available to make the comparison with whatever transaction method you prefer. You could fly gold bars around in small planes, and it would still be more efficient than Bitcoin.
- jakupovic 3y ago
  What if we have to account for all the bankers and their houses and cars and everything they need to live to continue our current financial order? People focus on simple math, but bitcoin doesnt need all the people to sign the docs and keep track of them, that's the catch.
  - qqqwerty 3y ago
    Bitcoin isn't replacing any of them, so it's a moot point. If someone wants to buy real estate using bitcoin they are still probably going to use a realtor (or at the very least a lawyer) and they still probably need a mortgage, title insurance, and home insurance. If a company wants to go public, there is still going to be an army of i-bankers involved, even in a bitcoin denominated world. The banking sector exists for a reason. There are certainly parts of it that are superfluous and excessive, but someone somewhere is willingly paying for that excess, and that won't change under a bitcoin regime. And I personally think that most of the excess is due to excessive speculative activity in our financial system, and if anything, bitcoin seems like it will make that part worse.

null0pointer 3y ago

Bitcoin’s transaction throughput is artificially limited (hamstrung) and so not a useful denominator for comparisons. In theory it’s possible for a Bitcoin-like blockchain to record all of Visa’s transactions in a single giga-block with only a single mining hash attempt. Transaction throughput is not meaningful here.

rspeele 3y ago
It's meaningful since Bitcoin is the most popular, most energy-consuming crypto and it has this limitation, with no plans of changing. "Well, it's supposed to suck like that" doesn't change that Bitcoin is consuming tremendous amounts of energy to serve very, very few customers.