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Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin dwarfs the electricity usage from the US Mint, the literal money printers.

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.

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There's US MINT, then there is Canadian MINT, then there is China MINT, ... Bitcoin is fully autonomous system serving all layers (from settlement to Lightning payments) without thousands of expensive shiny buildings and state armies to protect it.

We're comparing transactions per second, are we not?

The US Dollar has far more transactions per second than the measly 7 transactions per second.

on which layer? Bitcoin base layer has 7 TPS for which is able to guarantee its security properties. if you want to have fair comparison than maybe interbank settlements is close to what we are talking about. once we are talking about VISAs and Venmos we should pull Lightning network into discussion for which base layer provides security anchor.

Any and all layers.

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.

More the better. Makes me sleep good at night knowing my money are secured by the wall of energy. Also, mining is competitive business and more miners every day going off-grid plugging to energy source that would have been otherwise strained (solar, wind, hydro, flared gas, ..).

And you decided again to ignore my words about man hours. My point was NOT about electricity. I was saying how much money and energy all traditional finance related jobs consume.

What about the man hours behind Coinbase? ProShares Bitcoin ETF? Etc. etc.

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.

> What about the man hours behind Coinbase? ProShares Bitcoin ETF? Etc. etc.

"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?

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