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Comment by mxschumacher | Hacker News Reader

This is a bit of crypto-delusion I have never understood: why compare Bitcoin with the financial system as a whole to get out of the "it is mostly powered by coal plants in China"-argument?

Does Bitcoin assess credit risks of governments, companies and people and then extend+manage credit?

What does Bitcoin offer in regards to risk management/hedging for operating businesses?

Maybe Bitcoin has some liquidity management feature for real businesses that I am not aware of?

Bitcoin has very low uptake in payments, so trying to compare its energy consumption to all retail branches and the oil burned by the employees on their commute strikes me as misleading and ignorant

Modern banks and financial institutions are much more than a long list of payments. Please learn a little bit about what a company like Bank of America actually does

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I worked at Goldman Sachs for 3 years in technology and trading roles so I'm fairly confident that I am largely familiar with how a bulge bracket investment bank as well as how most consumer banking firms operate work.

It's not misleading at all. It's important to consider that a large group of human operators, using a separately large set of semi automated processes, are a large component of the current energy spend of aggregate financial activity - all those busy worker bees are using energy.

Not really interested in doing some super thorough calculation, hopefully this general outline makes a little bit of sense. I'm just asserting that if we are going to criticize one thing's energy spend, you need to actually define what you are measuring and determine a baseline with respect to what the current thing's energy consumption is, ideally as line items and then sources for each input component.

Looking forward to some sources. (If you are referring to the Argentina article, please just identify that as your source). No need to be antagonistic, we're all friends here.

>It's not misleading at all. It's important to consider that a large group of human operators, using a separately large set of semi automated processes, are a large component of the current energy spend of aggregate financial activity - all those busy worker bees are using energy.

A lot of that is compliance though. Some (or maybe even most, I'm not in the industry) of that doesn't need to exist for the system to function - the banking system would work just fine without suspicious activity reports. I don't think it's an apples to apples comparison as these checks don't and can't exist in cryptocurrency.

That's just scratching the tip of the iceberg, as mentioned above the traditional financial system provides lots of services that cryptocurrencies can't provide or don't provide at any meaningful scale.

But institutions like Goldman Sachs aren't going away if Bitcoin suddenly became the world currency, so including them in such calculations is misleading.

Look up e.g. VISA corporate responsibility report for 2019. It’s been some time since I’ve seen that, but iirc Bitcoin hash power takes like 120 TWh, “Big Tech” combined is like 50 TWh, and VISA with all the nuts and bolts (and people) is like 0.2 TWh - with proven consumption of renewable energy.

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