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Comment by woleium | Hacker News Reader

I have no idea if it’s true, but i did see some estimates that the visa and mastercard systems also use the same order of magnitude of energy.

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Not sure if its true, but even if it is, those two corps transact nearly the same amount as the US GDP every year.

Bitcoin's entire market cap is right now at a less than 1/10th of US GDP. Hard to say what the payment volume is since by all accounts, most movement in BTC is speculative rather than transactional.

Even if they use same order of energy. They process many many more orders of magnitude transactions.

And I doubt they use that much power. Modern developers are incapable of efficiency, but there is not that much processing to do.

> i did see some estimates that the visa and mastercard systems also use the same order of magnitude of energy

I strongly believe they don’t, but I’d love to see the math and be proven wrong.

Hard to imagine to be true as the whole point of Bitcoin is to use up resources to secure the ledger.

I hate having to defend Visa and MC, but at least they using that energy to enable day-to-day transactions that real people actually use.

Also, and a bit harder to overlook... Visa/MC are able to work thousands of transactions per second in the US alone. Bitcoin can do like 7. Not seven thousand, just seven. Worldwide.

It's not even a competition, really. BTC has no future without some radical changes.

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