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Is the energy consumption of VISA transactions calculated based on their servers energy consumption?
So now what about the energy consumption of the whole VISA company?
Visa has 19,500 employees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Inc.
Does Bitcoin employees 19500 people full-time to work? Time is interchangeable with money and money with electricity/CO2 emissions.
"Those critics of Bitcoin who point to its energy usage (as of this writing, ~75 terawatt hours per year) seem unwilling to acknowledge the energy usage that keeps the US dollar afloat. The US economy used almost 29,000 terawatt hours in 2019. As confirmed by the US Treasury Department, the value of the dollar is backed by all the goods and services in the US economy which would also include its energy sector. Furthe…
Except you're comparing all the "real things" that make up the US economy to Bitcoin where the energy usage is just for Bitcoin (discovering coins and doing transactions). The statement you quoted seems entirely disingenuous.
- One study [1] estimated that 70B kWh were required to run the Internet, at an estimated cost of ~$7B annually assuming 10c/kWh (which is probably high);
- One report [2] estimated the energy consumed by Bitcoin at 121.36TWh, which is 121.36B kWh.
So assuming these numbers are remotely accurate, which is a big "if" I'll admit, more energy is spent on Bitcoin than the entire rest of the Internet infrastructure.
Other commenters have asked variation of "once [coin] moves from PoW to PoS, what will [no coiners] complain about?" That's easy: not the (essentially pointless) energy expenditure (and resultant carbon footprint) obviously.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2016/06/28/ho...
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/
The difference is important because as Bitcoin adoption increases the number of transactions will increase and the cost-per-transaction will fall dramatically. But the actual marginal cost likely won't. (I bet the result would still dramatically favor Visa.)
Not sure why Visa is a relevant comparison. I can setup a dozen nodes on AWS and build a crypto with a million times the transaction capacity of Bitcoin. Obviously the downside to this is centralization; someone can be banned or censoredfor any reason. Blockchains are first decentralized, permissionless, censorship resistant solutions.
Because humans are deciding on whether to use BTC or another option for handling payments. This means that we must decide whether "decentralization, permissionlessness, and censorship resistance" are worth the astronomical other costs.
"Those critics of Bitcoin who point to its energy usage (as of this writing, ~75 terawatt hours per year) seem unwilling to acknowledge the energy usage that keeps the US dollar afloat. The US economy used almost 29,000 terawatt hours in 2019. As confirmed by the US Treasury Department, the value of the dollar is backed by all the goods and services in the US economy which would also include its energy sector. Furthe…
https://xrpl.org/carbon-calculator.html (scroll to the bottom)
Compares BTC/ETH/XRP/VISA/MASTERCARD and Paper Money
I wound not interpret too much into the actual values they are unlikely to be very accurate.
How about all the people work for Visa etc and their commutes and all the other things that come with it. If you think about it Bitcoin is completely autonomous
> Bitcoin is completely autonomous If we're counting the footprint of Visa's 19,500 employees [1], we'd have to start counting the footprint of every Bitcoin miner and ASIC manufacturer. Which is (a) silly and (b) unlikely to affect a difference of orders of magnitude. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Inc .
Not sure why Visa is a relevant comparison. I can setup a dozen nodes on AWS and build a crypto with a million times the transaction capacity of Bitcoin. Obviously the downside to this is centralization; someone can be banned or censoredfor any reason. Blockchains are first decentralized, permissionless, censorship resistant solutions.
Bitcoin is the defacto main cryptocurrency and Visa is one of the main payment processors.
A cryptocurrency not attached to anything else is useless. I'm sure you could easily beat Visa too by having a little app that "processes transactions" on some modern 5nm scale mobile device. But it wouldn't be real world useful.
"Those critics of Bitcoin who point to its energy usage (as of this writing, ~75 terawatt hours per year) seem unwilling to acknowledge the energy usage that keeps the US dollar afloat. The US economy used almost 29,000 terawatt hours in 2019. As confirmed by the US Treasury Department, the value of the dollar is backed by all the goods and services in the US economy which would also include its energy sector. Furthe…