Coindesk did a write up of this.

https://www.coindesk.com/microscope-real-costs-dollar/

Looks like data was taken from places like: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/policy_and_exchange_rates/ba...

and rest of the numbers were taking into account of how much each note costs to make.

"The Euro publishes sustainability statistics on their currency, and according to latest estimates, 3 billion banknotes printed in 2003 had an equivalent energy impact of 460,000 60W bulbs switched on for a year, which equates to 240 million kWh, or 0.87 million GJ. With circulation now at 15.8 billion notes, this would scale up to 4.6 million GJ (European Central Bank, 2007). To get to a global figure, for the purposes of this report, I will be multiplying this figure by a factor of four (i.e. a proportional share of global M0/M1 money supply). Therefore, we reach a figure of 18.4 million GJ, which would correspond to almost 3.07 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent."

This is just making a bank note, nothing about cost to distribute (guarding money, banking system, credit system).

I think it's a fair question; each transaction of paper money causes wear so it might make sense to amortize the cross of minting over each transaction. Plus transactions between banks would use some energy.

One can only assume the energy cost is negligible per transaction compared to bitcoin though, simply because if you scale up the transaction volume of bitcoin to what a real economy would need it's more than we produce.

Many bitcoin proponents believe that bitcoin can fully replace the current financial system so whenever the energy consumption problem comes up you should expect to hear someone talking about how much banks spend on air conditioning every year.

It depends on how far you want to go.

The cost per transaction would be interesting in real terms.

What's the comparison between:

- Manufacturing physical currency / Manufacturing the hardware to mine coins - Cost to run POS systems in retail outlets / Cost to run bitcoin network - Cost to run global fiat exchanges (i.e. wallstreet) / Cost to run global bitcoin network

Obviously you could drill down as far as you wanted. I'd imagine it would be quite difficult to draw up such a detailed comparison though.

This is anecdotal but my family operated a store in a rural vacation area and over half of our customers used cash. In the 2000s, we'd have to drive the cash 30+ minutes to the bank, twice weekly to mitigate the risk of a robbery. We sold the business, but more electronic transfers hopefully reduces the required driving miles, and overall cost to transact in cash.

are you sure?

all of these surely have a substantial eco footprint - money production, for both paper and coin - armored cars picking up cash and bringing to the bank - physical locations, banks, check cashing places

That's pretty much the only time it clearly consumes energy; and even worse, manpower.

The lights at the bank of america HQ don't keep themselves on.

Financial transactions are more than just exchanging pieces of paper in person.

what about running bank of america and visa?