Bitcoin is already the greenest form of finance and will get much cleaner in the future.
What nonsense is this?
Already ONE transaction consumes as much power as an entire American household uses for a week.That is 215 kwh of energy for one transaction.
It's using the equivalent of 2.26 million American homes worth of energy for just 330k transactions.
A significant chunk of that is wash trading, ie people buying and selling to themselves to manipulate the price. Is that worth it?
A simple visa or mastercard transaction produces several orders of magnitude less CO2.
For 330k transact
Also, cite your sources
Seems like humanity has engaged in war on a pretty regular basis since long before people decided to put their trust in paper money.
This is such a disingenuous point: as though a world running on Bitcoin wouldn't be filled with the exact same financial institutions, doing the exact same things they do now, even though those exact things are what all the new business involving Bitcoin are generally trying to do.
Nope. The marginal cost of a transaction is next to nothing. Just take a step back and think about what you're saying: that a bitcoin transaction would cost £3.40 in the UK. Obviously nobody would be using bitcoin if that were true.
Proof of work is where the value of the coin is derived. How much energy do you think it takes to mint a physical coin? Now compare that to the amount of energy it takes to transfer it to a shop assistant.
I hope I'm not misinterpreting your point, but bitcoin transactions cost even more than that.
https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...
Users have to bid for space on the blockchain to store transactions. Early on the space was cheap and miners got their profits from the # of bitcoins they mined. As that dries up the incentive to mine shifts toward transaction fees.
The electricity costs right now are unclear to users because of indirection. Mining dilutes the value of bitcoins each user holds but they do not see a loss in their wallet. I wonder if once confronted with even greater transaction fees over time whether users will be willing to continue to pay up to use it. One has to cross their fingers that the demand stays high enough to sustain enough mining to prevent the from being taken over with 51% attack.