Those bills cost energy to produce. The bank had to be built. There was a teller there, did they spend any energy driving to the bank that day? Did you use a duffel bag? Where’d that come from? Etc.
I’m not sure that any of this is meaningful in any way.
They include air travel and whatnot. Basically the whole energy consumption of the company. Also including building stuff etc.
Visa doesn't share that in order to poke at Bitcoin. They share that because enviromentalism is hip nowadays. So they want to tell how they're improving their CO2 emissions as a company.
- Visa: 7 million GJ
- Bitcoin: 403 million GJ
BTC is not magic dude, it has externalities too.
If the concern is the cost of brick and mortar banks then we can solve that with technology much more effectively than btc.
Bitcoin is too elegantly designed to approach in this fashion.
It's 2021. Carrying around duffel bags of paper bills received from a human bank teller is not how anyone manages their cash or transactions.
Bitcoin is not the only way to digitally transact. It's not even a good way. In practice, it's just about the worst way to handle transactions unless you have no other options.
Just like the mining rigs that produce bitcoin. It seems like you're conflating fixed costs (of plant and machinery) with marginal costs (of exchanging some amount of BTC vs fiat).
Now we have pure currency and all fiat currencies go to ~0 in less than 100 years.
USD, GBP, CAD = currency
Bitcoin, Gold, Silver = money
Incidentally, Bitcoin is also not a commodity in the general sense of the word (as opposed to the CFTC thinks it should regulate it like other exotic financial instruments sense of the word)
Bitcoin is forcing an expansion of the definition of money. A self-regulated financial network backed by tremendous amounts of hardware and electricity is "advanced money".
We are at a transition point so I don't expect good labeling/categorization from the shortsighted/incumbents/fiat-boomers (directed at the gatekeepers, not you personally).
Side note: What people complaining about electricity consumption don't get is, BTC transfers the uncounterfeitable properties of energy to a money.
Side note: what people don't get is that pretending tokens have more exchange value because more energy was expended than the printing of other tokens is just sunk cost fallacy.
>BTC transfers the uncounterfeitable properties of energy to a money.
This statement has a lot more depth than you seem to appreciate. I believe this is from a lack of understanding of BTC's incentive structure. Perhaps a few years from now you will gain enough of an understanding...Almost every thinking-person was in the position you are in (skeptic) at some point before an extended education and eventual full BTC adoption.
The sooner you get this education the better for your family, so I recommend diving deep sooner than later, even if you still end up as a "nocoiner".
Final Note: I expect clean energy regulations and BTC's hunger for hashrate will create a larger (more direct) market for cleaner energy and faster processing, which is a win-win for humanity.
"More Direct Market" clarification: Selling clean electricity to a power grid is much harder than selling it to the BTC network, especially in remote areas. The ability to easily monetize energy production on small/mid/large scales makes experimentation and innovation more likely.
Example: Many facilities now mine Bitcoin with otherwise flared waste gas and the controlled burn actually leads to less negative environmental impact.