There is simply no comparison. The banking system is many many, many orders of magnitude more efficient and to suggest otherwise is frustratingly disingenuous.

No it isn’t, banking system is idiotically expensive using much more raw energy but also is open for corruption, is run by greedy bankers that governments have to bail out all the time for taxpayers money, etc, etc. current financial system is many orders of magnitude more expensive and dangerous.

Suggesting otherwise is not just disingenuous - it is malicious.

Let's try and run some numbers then.

Estimated energy consumption - 46TWh [0]. Average transaction rate seems lower than 4/s at all times so let's use 4 [1]. That makes 126M/year.

Visa process 111B transactions per year [2] and mastercard 65B [3] for a total of 176B.

If those transactions alone were as energy expensive, then that would account for about 64,000 TWh.

Global energy consumption (all kinds) is about 110,000 TWh

For traditional banking to be more expensive in energy per transaction, it would seem to need to account for more than about 60% of all energy used if all banking were only these card payment services and nothing else.

Appreciate any checking of figures or calculations, though unless there's something very wrong the rough outcome should be the same given that I've only included a slice of transactions.

[0] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

[1] https://www.blockchain.com/en/charts/transactions-per-second...

[2] https://s1.q4cdn.com/050606653/files/doc_financials/annual/2...

[3] https://s2.q4cdn.com/242125233/files/doc_financials/2017/Q4/...

per Transaction calculations are completely flawed. If transaction cost was the primary goal - bitcoin would have been a centralized mysql database. Decentralized and secure ownership of your assets that doesn’t involve trust, politics and military is what important in bitcoin.

And by the way with payment channels all your numbers are irrelevant anyway because your assumption of 4 tx/sec goes out the window. Try again with 4 trillion tx/sec. And keep in mind that there is no upper limit.

> per Transaction calculations are completely flawed

They seem fairly important to me, but OK, what metric are you comparing on to claim that the current banking system is using far more raw energy?

Bitcoin has a market cap of $70B and daily volume of transactions of $10B.

NYSE covers about $20T alone for just 4000 companies. Scaled up, bitcoin would be over 10% of world energy use.

SWIFT seems to deal with about $5T per day https://www.fincen.gov/news_room/rp/files/Appendix_D.pdf so that'd be bitcoin taking about 20% of total global energy use if scaled up.

By what measure do you want to back up the claim that the current system is far more energy intensive? I'm trying to find one and honestly struggling.

> By what measure do you want to back up the claim that the current system is far more energy intensive? I'm trying to find one and honestly struggling.

how much damage financial and environmental have politicians and military have caused over the last 5 thousand years? yep, take that into account in your calculations.

You made a very specific claim which you seem reluctant to back up so we can leave that there. If you want to discuss in good faith, please try not to shift the goalposts so much. For example, your reply suggests that with crypto there would have been no military or political actions that were environmentally damaging.

i don't see a lot of good faith in your arguments if you keep sticking to 4tx/sec and measuring bitcoin costs in per-transaction terms.

i'll repeat and lets see how much good faith you have: payment channels encapsulate potentially unlimited amount of transactions which completely refutes all your calculations.

> i don't see a lot of good faith in your arguments if you keep sticking to 4tx/sec and measuring bitcoin costs in per-transaction terms.

edit - I haven't, and my last comment contained nothing to do with per-transaction figures.

I've asked what basis you made your initial claim on, and provided several options where I've looked - transaction rate as currently happens with bitcoin, market cap and daily volume of transactions. None look even vaguely reasonable - so again, what was your initial claim calculated on? What measure were you using and where did you get your numbers? Have you actually tried to work it out?

> i'll repeat and lets see how much good faith you have: payment channels encapsulate potentially unlimited amount of transactions which completely refutes all your calculations.

We have current use, how does that actually compare to the current banking system you were saying uses more energy?

I'm not sure how that's relevant to the calculation here.

This is by far the least productive HN thread I've ever been on. The article just isn't related to a raw energy calculation, as that is not impacted by where the energy comes from.

edit - noted. Avoid crypto threads on HN as they're like discussing things on reddit.

you're technically right that the article i linked isn't making the same calculation as you made. I'm not sure why you saw it as a rebuff or some kind of argument for/against. I linked it because i'd imagine that a big concern about blockchain energy usage is the environmental impact.

> banking system is idiotically expensive using much more raw energy

It uses much more raw energy because it services the financial needs of most of the planet. Bitcoin dubiously services the needs of a handful. This is so obvious that I suspect you're not arguing in good faith.

Yeah, way to miss the point. Bitcoin is money where security is expressed in terms of energy. Banking system uses energy and military to achieve the same job. Do i really need to elaborate further?

I am not missing the point, you're moving the goalposts

You: "the banking system is idiotically expensive using much more raw energy"

Me: "it uses much more raw energy because it services the financial needs of most of the planet".

No goalposts have moved. Banking system involves politics and military in securing your finances. It is therefore many orders of magnitude more expensive than bitcoin even if you normalize by market cap of transaction volume or pick your own metric.

Edit: typos

Politics and the military are the foundation of all society. Those things won't go away because of cryptocurrency, so repeatedly bringing them up doesn't help your point at all.

> Politics and the military are the foundation of all society

politics - maybe, military - not necessarily, just an artifact of infancy of our civilization.

> Those things won't go away because of cryptocurrency

those things will become irrelevant to financial system based on bitcoin, which is good enough for me.

> just an artifact of infancy of our civilization.

Just an artifact of all of human history.

>those things will become irrelevant to financial system based on bitcoin

I don't think there is any point in further discussion; we are simply living in two different realities. The military and the military industrial complex are not going anywhere, certainly not because of cryptocurrency, the notion is laughably absurd.

If you try reading my comments again you will realize I’m not claiming military and politics are “going” somewhere because of crypto.

> Banking system involves politics and military in securing your finances

I'm not a fan of the current implementation of cryptocurrencies but you have a point here. Plenty of wars and armed takeovers have been driven by the prospect of accessing financial systems and therefore plenty of resources are spent to prevent that from happening.

You’ve missed a few steps in your "therefore" there.

only for somebody not willing to think about how much damage corrupt (and not corrupt too) politicians and military have inflicted upon this world during short history of human civilization. financial and environmental.

if there's a chance to exclude them from the equation on security of financial system - it's a no brainer.