21–30 of 110 posts
It's worth mentioning that this kind of comparison is strange. Bitcoin mining does not get more difficult or change in any way with the number of transactions you mine. Mining always occurs on a single 80-byte header, and the entire transaction portion of that is a Merkle hash tree. The point here is that if Bitcoin would actually finally increase the block size of their chain (like Bitcoin Cash and others have done)…
The link doesn't state whether it's counting only the energy costs incurred by VISA, or if it includes the energy costs of making a transaction on the SWIFT payment network that VISA, Mastercard, banks, and other institutions run on top of. Obviously to do a fair comparison you have to take SWIFT into account, otherwise you're not capturing the true energy cost of making a VISA payment. https://www.investopedia.com/a…
VISA (or Mastercard) do not 'run on top of' SWIFT. The net position of each VISA/MC institution will be transferred with SWIFT, but this is one payment with potentially millions of underlying card transactions.
Nitpick: nothing gets transferred with SWIFT. SWIFT is a messaging service. Settlement happens on separate rails.
The lightning network will naturally grow as a result of this.
What all of these analyses fail to realize is that the network is just used for clearing most of trading and payments are actually done off network. Think of the difference between energy used to buy gold (just buy GLD) vs energy used to move physical gold. (Fuel + Security etc)
Fine, add 0.00000000000001% for the energy a wire transfer takes to net out hundreds of millions of credit card transactions.
I mean, I know people are commenting on whether the comparison is valid, but regardless, the BTC energy cost at at 741 kWh for a single transaction is pretty close to the average monthly household energy usage in the US of 867 kWh [1]. That seems pretty nuts on its face to me. [1] https://electricityplans.com/kwh-kilowatt-hour-can-power/
Yeah, but does this compare the cost of creation of the currency? Isn't that what's (fallaciously) being compared here? How much does it cost to create a US dollar, to be able to have transactions with it? Did it take 100 years of faith in the US credit to establish that? How much energy was that?
In truth, if I factor in the establishment of the United States and several hundred years of money policy, it'll be higher. But for a fair comparison with Bitcoin, that'd be unfair, right? Because the US's money policy is obviously historically tied to Britain's, so I should include that too. And Britain was adapting the system that was established in feudal times. A lot of work went into making fiat currency real.
So a fair comparison would be Bitcoin versus the cost to print money, plus the history of the US currency system, UK, and all of monetary history before that. This is starting to look pretty bad!
While the traditional financial infrastructure is under doing rapid modernization, my layman eye still see lots of manual intervention for compliance, enforcement, etc...
For the love of god, we get it. What are no-coiners going to complain about when ethereum moves to proof of stake?