For some reason you only decided to include VISA, while I meant the whole traditional finance system, including central and other banks. VISA can't operate by itself.
The US Bureau of Engraving and Printing has a $1 Billion budget for manufacturing.
https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/266/24.-BEP-FY-2022-B...
How far down the rabbit hole do you want to go? No matter how you look at it, Bitcoin is horribly inefficient. Compared to the US Dollar (the literal physical dollar), credit cards, banks, or other institutions.
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Mind you: Coinbase is _NOT_ part of the bitcoin mining network, despite being a "bank" or "exchange" that processes a huge number of bitcoin transactions. Even when we ignore the electricity costs of Coinbase (and other servers), the BTC electricity usage is colossal.
The US Dollar has far more transactions per second than the measly 7 transactions per second.
Bitcoin is miniscule, far smaller than the US Dollar. Do whatever you want to make BTC as big as possible. Artificially inflate the value and scope of BTC as much as you wish.
It won't be anything close to the US Dollar. And yet, the electricity usage of BTC is absolutely colossal.
As if BTC were absolutely free to use and maintain? Sure, its "just a private key", except no one I know can use GPG or PGP on their emails, so its a bit harder than that ya think?
The typical non-techie out there relies upon a techie to handle the details of private key, transactions and so forth. A BTC transaction will be handled by coinbase (or some other crypto-exchange + transaction processor) rather than by the users directly.
"Etc. etc." being how much? There aren't that many crypto exchanges. They don't have personnel in any way comparable in size to that of traditional finances. Also they're not part of bitcoin. It can operate without them. Centralized exchanges are actually part of traditional finance.
Two last paragraphs in your comment are completely out of context, but how is owning a private key for a wallet any different than owning and managing a password for your account on an exchange?
So if we need to consider the resources used by the whole banking system when thinking about VISA etc, we must do so for Bitcoin as well. Otherwise we’re just playing with blue-sky hypotheticals.
https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...
"Bitcoin Average Transaction Fee measures the average fee in USD when a Bitcoin transaction is processed by a miner and confirmed. Average Bitcoin transaction fees can spike during periods of congestion on the network, as they did during the 2017 Crypto boom where they reached nearly 60 USD.
Bitcoin Average Transaction Fee is at a current level of 1.560, down from 1.798 yesterday and down from 15.45 one year ago. This is a change of -13.20% from yesterday and -89.90% from one year ago."