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Comment by misnome | Hacker News Reader

> 1. There is no comparison made to the energy consumption of the traditional banking industry, which I am sure is not a particularly energy-efficient industry.

Despite declaring yourself not one, this (and every other one of your points) comes up _every single time_ crypto proponents are trying to seed FUD in any reporting about the energy usage of crypto. This is especially laughable when you then say

> ~2% of US power is generating over 1/3 of the world's Bitcoin.

It's good to know that it takes 2% of the US power grid to power 2.3 transactions per second.

By your own argument - unless the traditional banking industry tops out at 100% of US power usage for 115 transactions per second - it is definitely not worse than bitcoin.

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> this comes up _every single time_ crypto proponents are trying to seed FUD

And it's worth pointing out that it comes up every single time without a shred evidence, just a hunch that the crypto enthusiast ensures us is correct. I'd love to see some actual numbers on the energy consumption of the banking industry vs. crypto.

Or lets be real, let's compare the amount of energy used by the banking sector to provide the same store of value and 3 transactions per second or whatever minor utility BTC provides.

> And it's worth pointing out that it comes up every single time without a shred evidence

What evidence could I possibly provide for the claim "This article doesn't give any evidence of impact."

It is very clear that crypto transactions, for example, are much less energy-efficient than USD transactions. The article could have easily mentioned that, but it didn't.

Well earlier in this same thread:

> Visa used 189GWh in 2017, worldwide, of which around half was data centres [1]. That handled 111.2 billion transactions, so about 1.7Wh per transaction (half for datacentres). Bitcoin used 844670Wh per transaction.

That's about 500 000x more energy consumed per transaction by BTC than Visa. I guess it goes without saying that it's much less efficient.

For years now I encounter crypto enthusiasts have been suggesting that BTC is an improvement on the energy efficiency of traditional banking, without anything to back up this claim, and ignoring stats like the above over and over again.

> Despite declaring yourself not one, this (and every other one of your points) comes up _every single time_ crypto proponents are trying to seed FUD in any reporting about the energy usage of crypto

You have it backward, it comes up when reporting tries to seed FUD about crypto energy usage. Every point I made is that this article isn't actually saying anything obviously scary, it's just saying some facts in a scary voice.

> By your own argument - unless the traditional banking industry tops out at 100% of US power usage for 115 transactions per second - it is definitely not worse than bitcoin.

That's not my argument. They do different things. Despite its name, most cryptocurrency isn't really used as currency. As you say, it's slow and not very useful for that. I'm just making a comparison because most of the thoughtless FUD discussion assumes that USD is free (in energy terms).

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