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Comment by jlawer | Hacker News Reader

There is no effort to bring these to the same base. The global banking system is massive. The article is factoring retail banking, stock & bonds, finance, derivatives, payment processing and a lot more in to "Global Banking". Even if bitcoin was to replace the dollar and gold all at once, much of that infrastructure would still be needed.

Add to this bitcoin does an infinitesimally small number of transactions compared to the global financial system and I am doubtful that on a per value or per transaction basis that it would be within an order of magnitude. A lot of this is inherent to the design, and while it may be able to be evolved or an alternative crypto may not have the caveats, Bitcoin as it stands now is VERY power inefficient.

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Do you really think a startup running on Bitcoin can't be do a better job than the legacy banking system? And by startup I mean a group of people that write software in a competitive environment.

Those already exist (Lightning Labs) and there's so much more to do with a secure programmable distributed database.

At retail banking... No I don't think they can more effectively manage my grandmothers retirement account.

This requires people, and locations. Software isn't going to solve this problem. The only way I think this will be solved is by becoming very similar to what already exists.

Maybe not strictly software, although it's clear that the range of what's possible to do in software is only getting wider. It still doesn't preclude from involving people, and improving the quality of service.

Yeah, but that is the point, The figure for global banking is factoring in those Customer service, credit risk, trading and many other back office people. If you have to hire the same kinds of people then that isn't a massive saving. Your likely to get to a similar size to offer the same services. Bitcoin alone doesn't help that.

Yes you could create a more energy efficient bank, but that is orthogonal to that bank using bitcoin. Many people have tried, but most have failed. Those that succeed are generally acquired and the bigger banks tend to (albeit slowly) integrate those efficiencies.

The post I was replying to originally was citing an article claiming that the energy costs of holding dollars and gold was higher then bitcoin. I was showing how tallying the total energy used by global banks was a false equivalency as much of what a bank does has no direct equivalent in the numbers given for Bitcoin.

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