this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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Even when you throw in the entire electrical consumption of Visa down to the last lightbulb and ATM you’re going to be dwarfed by bitcoin. Mining is inherently necessary for bitcoin to process and records transactions, but even if it wasn’t the scale of waste just kills bitcoin. Running a few office buildings to serve hundreds of millions of people just can’t compete on a per transaction cost. And comparing the energy needed of one way to send money online to another way to send money online seems fair enough to me.
For scale, in an electric suv like the Ionic 5, 708kwh is enough to drive from California to Florida, and that’s necessarily for every single transaction.