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Re:Bitcoin Sees Wall Street Warm to Trading Virtual Currency by hudon on Tuesday May 08, 2018 @10:33AM (#17021136)
The problem with your assessment is that you’re assuming that Bitcoin is replacing banks and MSBs. If that was actually happening, you would be right, we should compare Bitcoin’s energy consumption with the industry it it replacing. But it is not happening, so why would we compare them?

The link I included does actually compare Bitcoin energy consumption to Visa by the way, and the difference is staggering.

Re:Bitcoin Sees Wall Street Warm to Trading Virtual Currency by nonbel on Tuesday May 08, 2018 @10:47AM (#17021245)
>"The problem with your assessment is that you’re assuming that Bitcoin is replacing banks and MSBs."

I never assumed that, nor that it won't (like you just did). I just said "supposed to replace".

Here is an example. Someone came up with the number 1700 TWh per year for data centers, wifi, computers, phones, tvs, etc. I have no idea, so just use that for now: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320225452_Total_Con...

Anyone familiar with whats on tv or the internet knows that 99% of all that is unnecessary, even unwanted, crap. That gives 1683 TWh being wasted each year on crap, yet people are only concerned about this 5%. I just want consistency so I don't feel like I'm being concern trolled.

EDIT:

Looking at the visa estimate I see right away it is underestimated by 40%:

>"In calendar year 2016, we used an estimated 674,922 gigajoules (GJ) of energy from Scope 1 and 2 sources [...] Of our total emissions, only 7% were from Scope 1 sources, with 54% from Scope 2 (primarily purchased electricity) and 39% from Scope 3 (mainly employee commercial air travel)."

https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate-responsibil...

So Visa alone is about 0.25 TWh per year.