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.