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Comment by spaced-out | Hacker News Reader

The link doesn't state whether it's counting only the energy costs incurred by VISA, or if it includes the energy costs of making a transaction on the SWIFT payment network that VISA, Mastercard, banks, and other institutions run on top of. Obviously to do a fair comparison you have to take SWIFT into account, otherwise you're not capturing the true energy cost of making a VISA payment.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/05051...

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If they factored in the other-bank transaction costs, there'd be something else to "what-about." What about the company's energy costs in its non-payment processing? How about all the plastic they use to make those credit cards? The silicon in the card swipe machine?

None of these things will bridge that gap, unveiling a missing data point that somehow makes VISA less efficient by six magnitudes that somehow researchers were missing all this time. But constantly asking for more detail is a good way to stay in denial about Bitcoin's terrible numbers.

> to do a fair comparison you have to take SWIFT into account

The difference is orders of magnitude. SWIFT won't cross the gap. Bitcoin has a lot of things going for it. Energy efficiency isn't one of them.

Perhaps you missed the fine print on the chart where it was comparing one BTC transaction to 100,000 visa transactions?

If the chart were anywhere close to 1:1 I could understand wanting to nitpick little details, but in this case go ahead and double/triple/quadruple the estimate, and it's still shocking.

VISA (or Mastercard) do not 'run on top of' SWIFT. The net position of each VISA/MC institution will be transferred with SWIFT, but this is one payment with potentially millions of underlying card transactions.

> will be transferred with SWIFT

Nitpick: nothing gets transferred with SWIFT. SWIFT is a messaging service. Settlement happens on separate rails.

If you add every layer above or below you would end up consdering the own internet infrastructure, wouldn't you?

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