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Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

Comparing bitcoin to the banking industry is so absurd to me unless you account for users served.

How much water per user served did the banking industry use? It makes sense that banking uses a lot of resources in total because it is a huge industry, serving hundreds of millions of people worldwide, if not billions. Bitcoin serves what, at most a few tens of thousands of users?

I heard people talk about the electricity usage of the banking industry in comparison to bitcoin and its the same thing. Yeah it takes a lot of energy to heat and cool every bank in the world, but it is serving several orders of magnitude more people than bitcoin and offering way more services. Can I walk in to a bitcoin building and get a loan for a new car? Nope.

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To put it in perspective Bank of America alone has over 60 million customers.

60 million real people. People that forget a password, lose their wallet, encounter fraud, need to walk into banks occasionally, use debit cards/deal with cash/ATMs, credit cards that are also accepted everywhere, and as you point out financing products people can actually use (not some crazy smart contract DEX who knows what), need help, have questions, etc, etc, etc.

Safety deposit boxes to notary services the list just never ends. This is just retail.

Plus little things like at least trying to comply with the law, customer protections, regulation, oversight, fraud departments, etc.

People that even bring up comparison to the banking or financial system in discussion of bitcoin power usage instantly have zero credibility.

Although the same could be said for almost any comparison between bitcoin and the banking system. It has total users measured in the 7-8 figures tops after 16 years for many valid reason.

Well yeah it’s called regulatory capital for a reason. Banks are happy to provide token services in exchange for mispriced loans from retail to support their nonretail biz. It’s cool I can walk into a BoA branch in my neighborhood; in exchange I can’t get a house for less than a million bucks. Number one rule of banking is retail’s getting fucked. Most people would be better off with a narrow bank.

Nothing stops you from borrowing Bitcoin loans and using that to pay for your house... except the risk that Bitcoin goes up from 40k€ to 60k€ and your loan got 50% more expensive and there you go, your comment becomes pure hypocrisy.

The idea that 11 people bidding up 10 houses is going to radically change if you have Bitcoin or a narrow bank is ridiculous. If people borrow Bitcoin for the loan, they will still have to outbid everyone else at exactly the same price measured in dollars, because eleven people are bidding up 10 houses.

I am honestly quite tired of nonsense like your comment. If the economy is in general equilibrium, then there is no meaningful difference between Bitcoin and the dollar. If there is no general equilibrium, I would expect Bitcoin to be further away from it than dollars.

> People that forget a password, lose their wallet, encounter fraud, need to walk into banks occasionally

hmm these seem to be usecases that are almost impossible for bitcoin/blockchains that say "cheap transaction fees / trust in the system" due to no-person-in-the-loop...

I honestly don't know if you're being sarcastic.

Yes, it's "not a problem" because all transactions are final and if you lose the key to your virtual wallet with all your savings, then you're fucked, but that's part of the point?

Banks provide these essential services that people need. Bitcoin doesn't, and it still consumes massively more energy.

sorry I'm not being sarcastic to you, but those bitcoin/blockchainers...

I just noticed you were listing vital features of a financial system, and yet wasn't using them as your foremost argument.

Perhaps it could be compared to _just_ FedWire. But even then, FedWire handles about $4t of transfers per day. That's a couple orders of magnitude more than BitCoin.

And that's literally one service, from one bank.

That is a reasonable comparison. Bitcoin can do that much volume as well (without much change in water “usage”). The difference being that one is controlled by the US government and one is not.

Bitcoin can handle $4T in transfers a day?

At ~700,000 transactions per day, if the avg txn value is $6M, then yes.

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