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Comment by aloer | Hacker News Reader

It wasn’t my intention to defend the banking system. But since you posted an article where Bitcoin is compared to this banking system I’d say it’s just fair to question whether they can actually be compared.

So, can they?

What’s the current transactions per day? How low can bitcoin energy consumption realistically go compared to where it is now?

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No, that wasn't my gripe. Bitcoin is a decentralized technological solution that almost completely replaces the banking system, I'd prefer that over the current Banking system, and bitcoin is global to boot.

Transaction per day -> it can do as many as you want. I run a lightning node and I've shown a lot of people how quick and cheap the transactions can be, and also how EASY it is to get setup to transact in bitcoin over lightning.

This. Every single article and discussion about this "problem" always uses base chain transactions as the divisor for the energy cost per transaction. The average Bitcoin transaction [0] is ~$500k right now. The protocol made a conscious decision to make layer 1 a settlement layer, and secondary layers as transaction layers. I personally make an order of magnitude more transactions on layer 2 than I do on layer 1. The company I work for fits into the same boat, and the vast vast majority of funds we receive are on a layer 2.

[0] https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/charts/average-transaction-am...

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