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Comment by hdhzy | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what's the energy consumption of an average credit card transaction (including keeping the infrastructure, charge backs etc.)...

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From the article:

VISA Network Statistics

VISA's estimated annual electricity consumption (TWh) 0.54

Number of U.S. households that could be powered by VISA 50,000

Electricity consumed per transaction (KWh) 0.00651

Number of seconds the electricity consumed by 1 VISA transaction could power 1 U.S. household 19

Number of VISA transactions that could be powered with the electricity consumed by 1 Bitcoin transaction 20,983 `

A decentralized network has trade offs associated with it.

The more important point is that VISA is broken by design. Every day hackers steal credit card info and leech millions from the system, which is included in the fee you pay. The only reason it keeps working is because hackers aren't sufficiently sophisticated yet.

The solution, of course, is to store a private key on a hardware device, not have the private key be 16+3 decimal digits and an expiration date.

That is entirely unrelated to a decentralized or centralized design. One could build a centralized CC network where we don't need to transmit credentials to third parties in order to make purchases.

I agree with you, but this is in principle a separate issue. We would like to aim for a system that has both the security of Bitcoin AND the "efficiency" of, in this example, VISA.

That would be great, but what if such a system doesn't exist? Pointing out inefficiencies in Bitcoin isn't very useful when no alternative exists to reach the same level of decentralization.

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