Since Russia has lots of energy, maybe they can use it to settle transactions?
Meanwhile Visa keeps on clearing incomparably more (by “several orders of magnitude”) encrypted transactions per second globally for miniscule energy?
Meanwhile Visa keeps on clearing incomparably more (by “several orders of magnitude”) encrypted transactions per second globally for miniscule energy?
https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/
The energy argument is correct for proof of work, not proof of stake.
One is a streaming service and the other is a payment network. It's like comparing a construction site to a restaurant in terms of fuel consumption.
Anyway, that was the concern. It contrasts with the fee set by percentage of transaction size used by Visa.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/09/business/bitcoin-mining-e...
> In Texas, where 10 of the 34 mines are connected to the state’s grid, the increased demand has caused electric bills for power customers to rise nearly 5 percent, or $1.8 billion per year
> The program pays miners, and other companies, for promising to stop using electricity upon request. In reality, they are rarely asked to shut down, but are still paid for making the pledge.
> From midnight to nearly 4 p.m. on June 23, Riot earned more than $42,000 from the program while continuing to mine Bitcoin. (Overall in 2022, Riot made nearly $9.3 million from participating in the program nearly 85 percent of the time, the data shows, though the grid operator asked companies to actually lower their use for about 3.5 hours.)
> Around that time, the company switched to the second technique: avoiding fees that Texas charges to maintain and strengthen the power grid. It did so by briefly shutting off almost completely.
> To incentivize big customers to conserve electricity, those fees are based on how much electricity they use during several peak summer moments. Riot reduced its power use by more than 99 percent.
> By 6:30 p.m., the company had resumed mining. If Riot had been fully operating all day, it would have incurred an estimated $5.5 million in fees — costs that are largely made up by other Texans. Over the course of the year, this saved Riot more than $27 million in potential fees.
> One final mechanism lets some companies make extra money when electricity prices spike: They can stop mining and resell electricity to other customers. That earned Riot roughly $18 million last year.
It's why I stopped taking late night drives in my car to wind down, instead taking walks. And why I try to drive to maximize fuel efficiency.
It's why I felt guilty every time I flew a plane while a student pilot and never finished a full pilot's license (I never would have started in the first place had I not been pushed to do so by my father).
Yes, some of us care.
Then I realized that I was compromising my own life, making sacrifices, and effectively giving away my power to the people who don't care.
So I changed tactics, and bought a jeep.
I'd have more respect if they just said "I hate crypto and want it banned".
From your own link, PoS Ethereum is 1/30,000 the energy cost of PoW Ethereum. From this link (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.03717.pdf ), back in 2021 PoW Ethereum spent 125.36 kWh per transaction, while VISA spent 0.0015 kWh, an 83 thousand fold difference. Depending on how these numbers all shake out VISA is still superior to PoS Ethereum by about 2-3X per transaction.
VISA transactions, with the fee paid by the receiver, obviously pull more off the top in excess of electricity costs (for larger transactions), but they also have purchase protection, customer service, and things such as points built it for particular cards. So not a complete apples-to-apples comparison.
[0] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/global/about-visa/documents/vi...
In what sense? Credit card companies manage their own fraud mitigation per federal law, which makes it easy for consumers to dispute transactions. If someone gets my crypto wallet PK and withdraws everything, who do I dispute that with? No way to reverse transactions in BTC.
If you want protection against that, get insurance.
Regardless, I’m not sure why it’s relevant to bring up what you like about credit cards. You’re free to use whatever currency you want, we were discussing whether it should be illegal for me to do the same.
That sounds like an implied criticism but I genuinely don't know the answer.