Bitcoin network average energy consumption per transaction compared to VISA

Also there is a link between weather and energy usage. An average household in Louisiana or California uses way more electricity than New York's average.

Germany ranks very high in terms of renewable energy ratio and I think that's more remarkable.

The number of transactions that are completed on the base layer is not the relevant metric. As the technology matures and as Bitcoin is more fully monetized, transactions will happen on higher layers. The "high" energy cost is necessary to secure the decentralized system.

No, the maximum number of transactions per block is fixed (actually, the maximum size of a block is fixed, but there's a limit to how small each transaction can be).

> and the cost-per-transaction will fall dramatically.

No, because of the limit on the number of transactions, the cost per transaction will increase (users have to pay a higher per-transaction fee to increase the chance of it being included in a block, and miners are incentivized to use the extra income from transaction fees to buy more power).

In the case of cryptocurrencies, the answer is likely a combination of what miners and users can support. The goal is to be large enough that we don't have throughput problems and block space doesn't become a bidding war.

It's also worth mentioning that this doesn't mean the end-users have to be able to run nodes themselves or on mobile phones, since that makes use of a process called Simple Payment Verification (SPV) where they only process block headers and get the blocks they are interested in, but still verify the consensus of the network.

But, it also depends on what you see cryptocurrencies as. If you want them to replace traditional cash and create a "digital cash" world, then you want to see them accepted and used anywhere at a very large scale. In that world-view you have millions of transactions regularly and miners get paid with the sum of lots of small fees.

However, if you think that cryptocurrencies should only be used as a speculative asset or as a "digital gold" then you don't care much about it actually being transacted, and in that case fees as high as $50/tx are fine because you don't have any expectation that the world will be using it at scale.

Nitpick: nothing gets transferred with SWIFT. SWIFT is a messaging service. Settlement happens on separate rails.

Banks store government money which depreciates gradually in good years, and devalues rapidly in bad years. It's all one direction, toward zero, it never gains value.

On top of the relentless depreciation, add the risk of bank insolvency.

Banks are terrible stores of value.

If your animal-raising machine is profitable, you absolutely want to put as much power into it as possible - raising more animals means more profit. Both machines can be optimized, but that just allows more production for the same energy use. There's no incentive to reduce energy consumption unless some other factor bounds the machine's capacity (for example lack of materials, hardware, labor)

Capitalism in general is a machine for consuming natural resources and converting them to profit as quickly as possible.

Yes, moving money to protect it from hyperinflation. Protecting it from being seized or appropriated by corrupt regimes.

Bitcoin moves money very well in those contexts, can Visa do those things?

M1 Money supply graph.

As your purchasing power gets eroded away ("stolen" by central banks), we each decide for ourselves how much we want to participate in the propping up a broken system.

They seem to equate kwh to some co2 emissions value and just multiplies them to create a comparative value.

1/ There are four stages that all market-based monetary goods pass through in their evolution to becoming a fully fledged money:

1. Collectible 2. Store of Value 3. Medium of exchange 4. Unit of account

Yes indeed we should consider all factors. For Bitcoins we should count the number of active full-time people employed as miners and developers.

I feel like the amount of people required to maintain a system should be counted in green efforts. Like for example bio supermarkets they provide you with products without packaging. Example you get your cereals from a giant glass container to your reusable container. Now that requires extra effort on handling/trasportation/refrigeration/storage. If all those things require a lot of more time we should consider the time of X people vs the saving in Y plastic or the saving in Z plastic.

It might turn out that Bitcoin employees less/equal/more people time for transaction. People's time is very expensive.

For example, early Bitcoin was generally, for purposes of discussion, about the same transaction throughput as we have today. But there were very few miners, so the energy costs were very low. Was Bitcoin truly many orders of magnitude more efficient back then? No.

It’s simply that there are many many more miners competing for rewards, because Bitcoin is valuable. There’s an energy lottery built into the Bitcoin protocol that emits new currency.

This lottery is directly related to the security of the network but not the number of transactions or usage. Unfortunately it’s hard to find an exact parallel but something like the military protection of the dollar would be a more valid comparison than Visa’s transaction volume.

Consider this: even if the blocks were empty, which means no transactions, the energy usage would be the same.

That's what hash power does.

I actually I would love to see some Bitcoin miners to comment about this whole topic more often on HN. I know at least some of them should be lurking here but for some reason decide to keep completely silent.

Do they have 1000s of office all around the world with 100s of thousands working in offices and branches like banking industry?

Bitcoin is just a distributed ponzi scheme.