How does Bitcoin electricity usage compare to something that achieves a similar goal?
A good example is gold—many people compare Bitcoin to gold. What are the relative electricity costs of the two, and does that justify the cost of either asset? This would take into account the electricity costs of mining, labor, supply chain, storage, etc.
Datacenters use about 205 TWh/year.
https://www.networkworld.com/article/3531316/data-center-pow...
Bitcoin uses about 75 TWh/year.
https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
Visa operates out of just two datacenters. They are famously secretive about their operations so I don't know how much power they use. The most I've found is that they have 'multi-megawatt' datacenters, which means they probably use more than three megawatts and less than 100.
https://youtu.be/fpmS0JYyCGs?t=66
Bitcoin uses about 8.5 gigawatts. Clearly it uses at least a few orders of magnitude more electricity than Visa. It can process four transactions per second compared to about 25,000 for Visa, so the energy per transaction is even worse by a few more orders of magnitude.
The inefficiency of Bitcoin is truly mind-boggling. If I were trying to write a hit piece, I wouldn't have the guts to make up numbers as bad as the reality.
Also, some currencies like Ethereum are moving to proof of stake, which requires less energy.