OTOH, did anyone ever consider the average pollution of the banking system? 10.000th of banks, 200+ central banks, BIS, IMF, ECB, etc, etc. Millions of employees, millions of desktops & servers, day-in-day out. Anyone with a link to a guestimate?
A Bitcoin transaction uses about 1,005 kWh, while 100,000 VISA transactions use 169 kWh, according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-co...
If a transaction costs half as much power every 4 years that's only 193 years until it's cheaper than visa[0]! Truly the financial instrument of the (distant) future!
[0] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=x%5E2+%3D+%281005%2F%2...
These are not alternatives to cash, they're alternatives to checks. The actual cash is held in accounts at centralized third parties (banks) who must be trusted to maintain accurate records, remain solvant, and not interfere with transactions legitimately approved by the account holders. What we see, however, is that the records are not always accurate, and banks do interfere with account holder-approved transactions, based on either their own policies or legal constraints. As for solvency… let's just hope that particular house of cards is never really put to the test.
Bitcoin, like physical cash, does not depend on trusted third parties. There are technological measures in place to guarantee accurate record-keeping, and while the sender of an "illegal" payment may be prosecuted after the fact (if they can be identified) there is little anyone can do either to prevent the payment from going through or to claw back the funds once they have been confirmed by the network.
This isn't a defense of the modern financial system, which is arguably a trash fire for plenty of reasons, but of course it's fairly energy intensive. It's massive. If it were replaced entirely by Bitcoin, it would be even more intensive.
not on a per transaction basis, which is the only relevant measure because the banking system supports a lot more people than bitcoin does.
A single bitcoin transaction uses 610.20 kWh right now, which is comparable to the energy consumption of an average US household over 20 days.[1]
Also for a comparison of scope, Tenpay, Tencents payment service processes about 1.2 billion transactions per day, Bitcoin does about 300k. If all financial transactions conducted in China alone would consume the amount of energy that a bitcoin transaction does, it would roughly eclipse the energy the country consumes in a year, in one day.
And then everyone gets "too cheap to meter" fusion power? There is not a /lot/ of headroom there, we surely can't go to outputting as much waste heat again as the planet gets from The Sun - and before you say "solar", you already said "fusion".
Still, I think that's the proper comparison—human processes are the analogue to keeping a blockchain online and mining.
All the energy in bitcoin is not wasted on keeping and organizing that tiny ledger (barely 300 GB of data!), it's wasted on brute forcing hashes, with the energy required ramping up exponentially with interest in bitcoin.
As ingenious as bitcoin is, that is a fatal flaw. Using bitcoin is like rolling coal, only worse for the environment.
If you have an issue with how the energy is generated take it up with your local government.
I mean we don't really have that in the case of bitcoin, which is predominantly mined in China these days probably precisely because state subsidised energy projects have created a ton of useless energy surplus, on which bitcoin lives.
Which is ironic in and of itself, the libertarian currency de jure runs on the misallocated resources of a state planned economy lol.
Just imagine if the transactions actually costed as much as their energy consumption suggests and environmental damage priced in.
* Bitcoin: 0.1% of all electricity, 7 transactions per second.
* THE ENTIRE REST OF CIVILISATION, FINANCIAL SYSTEM AND ALL: 99.9% of electricity, a heck of a lot more than 6,993 transactions per second.