Bitcoin used 844670Wh per transaction [2].
[1] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate-responsibil...
Bitcoins are just speculative assets . All crypto is, nobody is actually doing real economic transactions on them, I.e buying and selling services/goods for bitcoin. It is not practical to do so with transaction/gas fees .
If you think of it as an Asset transactions then it makes sense, those are always expensive.
A real estate deal for a house will have buyer agent, seller agent government taxes etc easily 5-10% , if you sell an artwork a gallery will probably charge upwards of 10-20% etc.
I don't like it, I don't support this industry, it is still big waste of energy, however if you see it from a lens of asset instead of currency then it kind of make sense that transactions are expensive.
Money has four functions traditionally, Bitcoin does not work for three of them: medium of exchange(too expensive), unit of account(too volatile), standard of deferred payment (too volatile), it kind of works as "store of value", i.e asset despite the volatility as the deflationary pressure due to its by design purchasing power increases.
Smarter economists can explain it better than me, my point is, don't think of it as a currency, it is really not, just an asset class ( still wasteful).
1. Bitcoin is a final settlement system, akin to moving gold bars from one vault to another. It achieves this settlement in minutes and requires no trusted intermediaries.
2. Bitcoin's energy consumption is a function of price, not of transaction throughput, so the two are orthogonal.
You could fly gold bars around in small planes, and it would still be more efficient than Bitcoin.
The banking sector exists for a reason. There are certainly parts of it that are superfluous and excessive, but someone somewhere is willingly paying for that excess, and that won't change under a bitcoin regime. And I personally think that most of the excess is due to excessive speculative activity in our financial system, and if anything, bitcoin seems like it will make that part worse.
Seems I was off by about 5 orders of magnitude, in Blockchains favour!
BTC is about 9 orders of magnitude less efficient than the effective work it does.
Look, you can run a full Bitcoin node on a Macbook that uses 20W. It can easily verify 5 transactions per second, put them into a block, and compute the hash of it, and do some network communications.
The actual network uses 20GW, a billion times more energy, because they have thousands of nodes replicate the same work and then add PoW as a cherry on top.
In theory it’s possible for a Bitcoin-like blockchain to record all of Visa’s transactions in a single giga-block with only a single mining hash attempt.
Transaction throughput is not meaningful here.
"Well, it's supposed to suck like that" doesn't change that Bitcoin is consuming tremendous amounts of energy to serve very, very few customers.