Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I don't know how to quantify the electricity/carbon use of large banks and multinational law firms, but it probably isn't small?

The current "safelow" gas price on Ethereum is 2.6 gWei, or $0.016.

https://ethgasstation.info/

Stripe/Paypal both charge more than $0.30, or 15-30 times more.




Best estimates are that Bitcoin consumes a ton of power, more than Ireland or Israel at this point. Current estimates, and estimating this stuff is very hard, but the range we're looking at is in the 56-73TWh per year.

Handily enough, we know exactly how much electricity Visa used in 2017, and it's about 0.19TWh[0]. Now obviously Visa alone isn't the end of the financial system, bank branches, payment processors, and other actors are involved. Personally, I highly doubt that they add up to another 55-72TWh, but if you can prove that, be my guest.

Of course, at this point we're also missing a very important factor: transaction volume. Comparing financial systems in terms of total energy usage is very misleading, a far better way is to measure energy per transaction. And this is the point where it really falls apart for Bitcoin. As of today, bitcoin is averaging about 180,000 transactions a day. That's about 100 seconds of Visa's average volume[1].

Comparing fees is a terrible way to measure transaction cost in terms of kWh. First of all, Stripe and Paypal employ a lot of people, and people are quite expensive. Second, bitcoin miners are being compensated by the expected rewards of finding a block (or participating in a pool that finds one). This means that the transaction fee and the amount of electricity used simply may not be related at all, since the fee might drop below the electricity cost so long as the expected reward is bigger still.

0. https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate-responsibil... 1. 150,000,000 transactions per day[2] / 86400 2. https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/small-business-tools/.... Theoretical (and heavily advertised) capacity is 24k, but a more prosaic 1.8k/s is more in line with a typical daily load.




Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: