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The no right turn sign appears to be for the other side of the street, since at the intersection itself, there's a one way sign indicating right turns are possible, and no do not enter signs.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.