I’d be very surprised if Visa can clear transactions with less energy than Ethereum Proof of Stake requires.

https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/

The energy argument is correct for proof of work, not proof of stake.

Everything else held equal it will always take more energy to have multiple computers ready to verify transactions, as well as the computational overhead of determining on the fly which computer actually will verify which transaction, than to have one computer verifying transactions.

From your own link, PoS Ethereum is 1/30,000 the energy cost of PoW Ethereum. From this link (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.03717.pdf ), back in 2021 PoW Ethereum spent 125.36 kWh per transaction, while VISA spent 0.0015 kWh, an 83 thousand fold difference. Depending on how these numbers all shake out VISA is still superior to PoS Ethereum by about 2-3X per transaction.

I think you're ignoring the energy spent on physical buildings, cars, and vehicles that power the banking/credit-card complex.

What does this even mean? Visa cards can be used for online purchases just like crypto. However crypto has a minuscule presence when it comes to physical stores. Why are you comparing apples to oranges.

These costs exist for the blockchain networks, too.

What's the average transaction fee for Ethereum versus visa?

Currently it's at about 77 US cents per average transaction, with the fee paid by the sender. A month ago it was briefly above $2.70.

VISA transactions, with the fee paid by the receiver, obviously pull more off the top in excess of electricity costs (for larger transactions), but they also have purchase protection, customer service, and things such as points built it for particular cards. So not a complete apples-to-apples comparison.

That's only first layer transactions. Second layer transactions are orders of magnitude cheaper. Think of layer 1 as your checking account and layer 2 as your credit card. You don't use your checking account often.

I don't think energy consumption was ever actually a virtue of the people who complained about it. It was just a means to an end for curbing crypto and it's grifts.

It's why when I first read about crypto back in 2013 or so I thought about getting into Peercoin whenever I had the money to do so. And it's why years later, when I finally had the money to do so, I never bought any crypto, even when FOMO was hitting hard.

It's why I stopped taking late night drives in my car to wind down, instead taking walks. And why I try to drive to maximize fuel efficiency.

It's why I felt guilty every time I flew a plane while a student pilot and never finished a full pilot's license (I never would have started in the first place had I not been pushed to do so by my father).

Yes, some of us care.

I did that too for the first 30 years of my life.

Then I realized that I was compromising my own life, making sacrifices, and effectively giving away my power to the people who don't care.

So I changed tactics, and bought a jeep.

I'm in my 40s. Lawful Good isn't going to change. I like being able to live with myself, thank you very much.

Yeah it was: the energy cost (as in electric bill) to settle transactions is so large that all but huge transactions are money losers.

Anyway, that was the concern. It contrasts with the fee set by percentage of transaction size used by Visa.

And people in locations with big crypto farms can feel the hit in their own energy bills. Even people who never even heard of crypto will start to care when it hits their own pocketbook.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/09/business/bitcoin-mining-e...

> In Texas, where 10 of the 34 mines are connected to the state’s grid, the increased demand has caused electric bills for power customers to rise nearly 5 percent, or $1.8 billion per year

> The program pays miners, and other companies, for promising to stop using electricity upon request. In reality, they are rarely asked to shut down, but are still paid for making the pledge.

> From midnight to nearly 4 p.m. on June 23, Riot earned more than $42,000 from the program while continuing to mine Bitcoin. (Overall in 2022, Riot made nearly $9.3 million from participating in the program nearly 85 percent of the time, the data shows, though the grid operator asked companies to actually lower their use for about 3.5 hours.)

> Around that time, the company switched to the second technique: avoiding fees that Texas charges to maintain and strengthen the power grid. It did so by briefly shutting off almost completely.

> To incentivize big customers to conserve electricity, those fees are based on how much electricity they use during several peak summer moments. Riot reduced its power use by more than 99 percent.

> By 6:30 p.m., the company had resumed mining. If Riot had been fully operating all day, it would have incurred an estimated $5.5 million in fees — costs that are largely made up by other Texans. Over the course of the year, this saved Riot more than $27 million in potential fees.

> One final mechanism lets some companies make extra money when electricity prices spike: They can stop mining and resell electricity to other customers. That earned Riot roughly $18 million last year.

You're right about that. It's hilarious to watch first world citizens posting opinions about BTC energy consumption on their made in china computers. You'd think they'd downgrade their comfortable lifestyles or at least stop trading with china if that was so important to them. No, better focus on cryptocurrency instead which is not even 1% of global energy consumption.

I'd have more respect if they just said "I hate crypto and want it banned".

You'd think we'd have solved climate change by now, judging from how important energy conservation is to the anti-Bitcoin crowd.

Bit odd to see the comparison of ethereum to YouTube and netflix. What is that supposed to show?

It’s supposed to show relative power consumption. Which it does. What would you like to compare it to?

Other payment networks? Stripe, square, interac?

One is a streaming service and the other is a payment network. It's like comparing a construction site to a restaurant in terms of fuel consumption.

I could also compare it to the power consumption of the lightbulb in my garage. It is apples-to-oranges to compare a payment network to a video streaming platform, the only useful comparison is to another payment network.

There's no world in which a decentralized algorithm is more energy efficient than the equivalent centralized algoritm, all other factors being equal.

Everything I've read suggests the Visa network only processes ~5-10k transactions per second, which you could do on a single modest server. It is apparently built to handle up to 75k TPS[0]. Certainly it should be doable with less than 300 kW average.

[0] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/global/about-visa/documents/vi...

Visa the company has over 20,000 employees. Presumably that network wouldn't function without them. Shouldn't the entire company's energy footprint be included in that 300kW?

VISA provides more services than transaction verification. Should the exchanges be included in the Ethereum energy footprint?

No.

I would be very surprised if it didn't. Ethereum still has to deal with a hugely distribuited database updating all nodes, where VISA only has to update however many copies they keep, which will certainly be order of magnitudes less. Both of course would be much cheaper then Proof of Work systems.

Comparing the security of visa transactions to crypto is laughable. The IRS literally had a bounty out for anyone that could trace monero. Meanwhile, seizing money from traditional bank accounts and tracking credit card transactions is an every day chore for the government.

> tracking credit card transactions is an every day chore for the government.

In what sense? Credit card companies manage their own fraud mitigation per federal law, which makes it easy for consumers to dispute transactions. If someone gets my crypto wallet PK and withdraws everything, who do I dispute that with? No way to reverse transactions in BTC.

“per federal law” is the sense that I refer to. Federal law includes stopping not only fraud, but political adversaries (ie. Canada), the aforementioned privacy preserving tools, trading activity between consenting parties in the name of investor protections, and various other violations of the force is only justified in response to force rule. It’s interesting how people that normally claim to support privacy will go all patriot act over financial privacy.

Regardless, I’m not sure why it’s relevant to bring up what you like about credit cards. You’re free to use whatever currency you want, we were discussing whether it should be illegal for me to do the same.

Non-reversible transactions are a feature not a bug.

If you want protection against that, get insurance.

Are you two agreeing implicitly, in that insurance IS the point of a credit card company?

For about a 63 cent stamp and a 5 cent security envelope you can send about $8000 or so of effectively untraceable hundred dollar bills with the USPS.

For 5 cents you can send any amount of monero anywhere around the world and have it settle in 25 minutes. The transaction is irreversible and obfuscated - sender, receiver and quantity.

Can you send it to the grocery store you're trying to leave with food sooner than 25 minutes?

That sounds like an implied criticism but I genuinely don't know the answer.

Yeah every transaction has a one-time key you can give them. Settlement in 25 minutes is quicker than the 1–5 days they already deal with.

Nice and private, those transactions