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Comment by aianus | Hacker News Reader

> So each transaction costs 11000/2000=5.5 USD

No, each transaction costs at most $5.50 USD. You haven't established any lower bound in your calculations. A better approach would be to calculate the average number of hashes required to mine a block and the power efficiency of the latest generation ASIC miners.

Also, for what it's worth, $5 is much cheaper than a Western Union or SWIFT wire transfer so even this upper bound doesn't mean Bitcoin is uneconomical compared to modern banking.

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This chart shows that the cost per transaction is around $8: https://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction

I believe this is because the average block size is less than 1 MB: https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-block-size

Except environmentally, you need to look at the energy footprint of Western Union compared to the network of Bitcoin miners, not the price of electricity or amount of coins awarded.

Western Union's energy footprint is no doubt large. Is it larger than the Bitcoin networks? I don't know, but WU has extensive infrastructure in place all over the World, so it's not a simple case of Bitcoin being the only ecologically unsound option of the two.

No, you need to look at the energy footprint of the entire currency system including printing and movement of cash, not just Western Union.

Meanwhile in Europe I'm paying 30 cents for bank transfers within the EU up to 50K.

and in a country where Western Union is actually the preferred payment option, the transaction fee allows a recipient that may not even own a computer to go to a shop in their village and collect local currency they can actually spend on the things they need

That's a shame. I just transferred money from one bank to another here in the US and it was free. To my surprise it also happened instantly!

Is this a recent development?

>much cheaper than a Western Union or SWIFT wire transfer

But in practice, even when a user moves bitcoins between their own wallets its results in that transaction getting registered in the block chain. Which is very unnecessary, costly, inefficient and also may compromise the user's privacy. That's why IMHO some kind of solution whether it is lightning network[1] or sidechains is needed.

[1] https://lightning.network/

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