Re:Visa May Add Cryptocurrencies to Its Payments Network, Sa...
by Mc_Big_G on Monday February 01, 2021 @11:12AM
(#25989907)
What about all the cascading costs to run all non-crypto financial systems? Not just data centers, but everything related like infrastructure, real estate, credit card readers, point of sale systems, office furniture, salaries, etc... The list goes on and on. If crypto was used globally, much of these costs and energy waste would disappear.
Also, some currencies like Ethereum are moving to proof of stake, which requires less energy.
Datacenters use about 205 TWh/year.
https://www.networkworld.com/article/3531316/data-center-pow...
Bitcoin uses about 75 TWh/year.
https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
Visa operates out of just two datacenters. They are famously secretive about their operations so I don't know how much power they use. The most I've found is that they have 'multi-megawatt' datacenters, which means they probably use more than three megawatts and less than 100.
https://youtu.be/fpmS0JYyCGs?t=66
Bitcoin uses about 8.5 gigawatts. Clearly it uses at least a few orders of magnitude more electricity than Visa. It can process four transactions per second compared to about 25,000 for Visa, so the energy per transaction is even worse by a few more orders of magnitude.
The inefficiency of Bitcoin is truly mind-boggling. If I were trying to write a hit piece, I wouldn't have the guts to make up numbers as bad as the reality.