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Comment by mcjshciejebcu | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I read anything about how resource intensive the bitcoin network is, I wonder how it compares to the total energy and other resource use of traditional finance. Those costs have got to be pretty high for traditional finance, especially considering minting and transportation of physical money and considering the innumerable humans needed to run it. However, I've never seen a serious estimate of those numbers, so I have no idea how they compare to bitcoin's.

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These comparisons have been around for a while and they always look really bad for Bitcoin [0], not just in terms of resources but particularly in terms of speed and responsiveness.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.in/cryptocurrency/news/a-single-...

That's getting close, and it doesn't look good for bitcoin, but the estimates of visa's energy useage are from a visa published report, and they seem to omit the energy usage needed to sustain employees. Of course, the bitcoin energy estimates also omit the energy usage for employees, but it's easy for me to imagine those are dwarfed by mining costs, and it's not easy for me to imagine something similar for visa.

The energy usage to attribute to employees should be proportional to the number of employees more than anything else. There's no a priori reason to expect that a "Bitcoin employee" uses more or less energy than a "VISA employee."

So as far whether or not that matters... do you expect that there is a substantially different number of employees need to maintain the VISA system than the Bitcoin system, on a per-transaction basis? Even if you're generous and say that VISA needs 10× the employees that Bitcoin would (were it the same size as VISA), it would still require that an employee use 100,000× the energy cost of a transaction to overcome the fact that Bitcoin transactions require 1,000,000× the energy of VISA.

I would expect visa to need more employees to maintain their systems, but that's just my intuition, and it might be wrong. You're right, too. Even though humans are very resource intensive (they need > 2kWh of energy per day), they're unlikely to outweight many orders of, magnitude difference.

I'd like to see an estimate of visa's energy usage using the same method the source you linked used to estimate bitcoin's energy usage. Take visa's revenue and multiply it by some fraction of revenue used for energy use (they used 52%). Some very rough calculations I did put it about 1000 times more energy expensive than visa's own report. That's still 1000 times better than bitcoin, using the same method, but it'd interesting to know where the discrepancy comes from, and whether that should also be considered for bitcoin's energy use.

I think it's a somewhat moot comparison, as Bitcoin does just about none of what traditional finance actually does, particularly on the "human" side of things.

Yeah, good point. It's really impossible to disentangle the costs of traditional finance operations analogous to bitcoin from other costs of traditional finance. The comparison would not be perfect, bit I still feel like it would be a useful insight to get a sense of scale.

Unless bitcoin can credibly be a total replacement for traditional finance this isn't really a meaningful comparison though.

Perhaps bitcoin or some other crypto can serve as a currency in a sense, but you'd still need financial institutions to do things like write loans and manage other assets.

Another commenter bbrought this up. I agree, it's not an apples to apples comparison, but think it would still help give a sense of scale.

Resource intensity refers to resource use per unit of output [1] not resource use in absolute terms, which is a meaningless statistic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_intensity

Right, and I haven't seen estimates for the resource intensity of traditional finance. (We do have good estimates of the total volume of traditional finance, so an estimate of the total resource usage of traditional finance would be just as good as resource intensity)

I don't know how one goes about measuring resource usage, to be honest. I suppose you can make an inventory of all the resources that have been used by a particular industry over a period of time, but this isn't a single number that can be used to compare the resource intensities of different industries.

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