Bitcoin network average energy consumption per transaction compared to VISA

I mean, I know people are commenting on whether the comparison is valid, but regardless, the BTC energy cost at at 741 kWh for a <i>single</i> transaction is pretty close to the average monthly household energy usage in the US of 867 kWh [1]. That seems pretty nuts on its face to me.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;electricityplans.com&#x2F;kwh-kilowatt-hour-can-power&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;electricityplans.com&#x2F;kwh-kilowatt-hour-can-power&#x2F;</a>

It&#x27;s worth mentioning that this kind of comparison is strange. Bitcoin mining does not get more difficult or change in any way with the number of transactions you mine. Mining always occurs on a single 80-byte header, and the entire transaction portion of that is a Merkle hash tree.<p>The point here is that if Bitcoin would actually finally increase the block size of their chain (like Bitcoin Cash and others have done) then a.) there wouldn&#x27;t be a constant backlog of transactions and b.) the &quot;energy-per-tx&quot; graph like this would look better.

The link doesn&#x27;t state whether it&#x27;s counting only the energy costs incurred by VISA, or if it includes the energy costs of making a transaction on the SWIFT payment network that VISA, Mastercard, banks, and other institutions run on top of. Obviously to do a fair comparison you have to take SWIFT into account, otherwise you&#x27;re not capturing the true energy cost of making a VISA payment.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.investopedia.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;personal-finance&#x2F;050515&#x2F;how-swift-system-works.asp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.investopedia.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;personal-finance&#x2F;05051...</a>

Here&#x27;s a fun comparison for you:<p>- One study [1] estimated that 70B kWh were required to run the Internet, at an estimated cost of ~$7B annually assuming 10c&#x2F;kWh (which is probably high);<p>- One report [2] estimated the energy consumed by Bitcoin at 121.36TWh, which is 121.36B kWh.<p>So assuming these numbers are remotely accurate, which is a big &quot;if&quot; I&#x27;ll admit, more energy is spent on Bitcoin than the entire rest of the Internet infrastructure.<p>Other commenters have asked variation of &quot;once [coin] moves from PoW to PoS, what will [no coiners] complain about?&quot; That&#x27;s easy: not the (essentially pointless) energy expenditure (and resultant carbon footprint) obviously.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;christopherhelman&#x2F;2016&#x2F;06&#x2F;28&#x2F;how-much-electricity-does-it-take-to-run-the-internet&#x2F;?sh=52ca4ff81fff" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;christopherhelman&#x2F;2016&#x2F;06&#x2F;28&#x2F;ho...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-56012952" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-56012952</a>

Bitcoin&#x27;s primary use case isn&#x27;t the same as Visa&#x27;s.<p>Visa is good at processing many small transactions.<p>Bitcoin is good at storing value over time, across borders, without censorship.<p>Since Bitcoin is useful without many transactions, it&#x27;s deceptive to measure its energy usage per transaction.<p>It would be equally useless to cite Visa&#x27;s 10-year stored value percentage gain vs. gold, because preserving value over time is not what Visa does.

The judgemental overtone of these comparisons never makes sense to me. We supposedly draw the line on how others spend their energy when it comes to bitcoin and nowhere else.<p>Animal agriculture is a great place to look when it comes to senseless energy expenditure just to produce products that please our taste buds, if this were something we actually cared about, but we don&#x27;t. 800-1200kWh are consumed to prop up a single dairy cow every year, just to produce a product that tastes good. 250M+ dairy cows in the world.<p>It&#x27;s just so tempting and convenient to bemoan things we happen to not partake in, and then we pat ourselves on the back as if we are avoiding it for ecological&#x2F;energy reasons.<p>It&#x27;s a bit boring to see on HN every week, mostly because it&#x27;s a cesspit of world view confirmation and anti-bitcoin circlejerking rather than a spark of intellectual curiosity.

Not sure why Visa is a relevant comparison.<p>I can setup a dozen nodes on AWS and build a crypto with a million times the transaction capacity of Bitcoin. Obviously the downside to this is centralization; someone can be banned or censoredfor any reason.<p>Blockchains are first decentralized, permissionless, censorship resistant solutions.

There is no paper&#x2F;overview of how those 2 values are calculated. One questions that comes to mind is:<p>Is the energy consumption of VISA transactions calculated based on their servers energy consumption?<p>So now what about the energy consumption of the whole VISA company?<p>Visa has 19,500 employees <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Visa_Inc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Visa_Inc</a>.<p>Does Bitcoin employees 19500 people full-time to work? Time is interchangeable with money and money with electricity&#x2F;CO2 emissions.

Bitcoin&#x27;s reward per transaction and fee per transaction would be orders of magnitude smaller if it followed the community and Satoshi&#x27;s original plan and allowed for blocks to grow to meet market demand.<p>Previous discussion on this:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26374566" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26374566</a>

Here is something similar with more different technologies<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xrpl.org&#x2F;carbon-calculator.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xrpl.org&#x2F;carbon-calculator.html</a> (scroll to the bottom)<p>Compares BTC&#x2F;ETH&#x2F;XRP&#x2F;VISA&#x2F;MASTERCARD and Paper Money<p>I wound not interpret too much into the actual values they are unlikely to be very accurate.

Who provided this data ? We used WAY WAY WAY less energy in Brazil. Maybe the US is indeed the new third world country.

What all of these analyses fail to realize is that the network is just used for clearing most of trading and payments are actually done off network. Think of the difference between energy used to buy gold (just buy GLD) vs energy used to move physical gold. (Fuel + Security etc)

What is the economic (hence energy cost) impact of maintaining the financial infrastructure where VISA is only a tiny part of?<p>While the traditional financial infrastructure is under doing rapid modernization, my layman eye still see lots of manual intervention for compliance, enforcement, etc...

Does this actually include all the energy needed to maintain the VISA infrastructure too? Like the servers, energy used by VISA employees, offices, etc?

Does this also include all the energy required to maintain the VISA infrastructure too? Like the servers, employees, office etc!

The lightning network will naturally grow as a result of this.

It’s not really directly related.<p>Miners load hash rate to get a better chance at the next block, the transactions just go along for the ride.<p>This would be true regardless of how much hash power is cumulative.

Is this really per transaction or per block?

apples and oranges

So another story about Bitcoin‘s energy consumption. Sigh. What we should really be interested in is its actual carbon foot print. You can’t just translate energy usage into CO2 emissions. These are a function of geolocation and energy efficiency of the underlying hardware. It’s actually pretty tricky to calculate that.<p>If anybody&#x27;s interested, here is a careful analysis of Bitcoin&#x27;s carbon foot print (2019): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedirect.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;article&#x2F;pii&#x2F;S2542435119302557" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedirect.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;article&#x2F;pii&#x2F;S254243511...</a><p>TL;DR: While there is this &quot;energy consumption of Argentina&quot; number in circulation implying Bitcoin&#x27;s carbon emissions equates that of a whole developed country, in reality this number is closer to that of Kansas City.

Yeah, but does this compare the cost of <i>creation</i> of the currency? Isn&#x27;t that what&#x27;s (fallaciously) being compared here?<p>How much does it cost to create a US dollar, to be able to have transactions with it? Did it take 100 years of faith in the US credit to establish that? How much energy was that?

How about all the people work for Visa etc and their commutes and all the other things that come with it. If you think about it Bitcoin is completely autonomous

For the love of god, we get it. What are no-coiners going to complain about when ethereum moves to proof of stake?

&quot;Those critics of Bitcoin who point to its energy usage (as of this writing, ~75 terawatt hours per year) seem unwilling to acknowledge the energy usage that keeps the US dollar afloat. The US economy used almost 29,000 terawatt hours in 2019. As confirmed by the US Treasury Department, the value of the dollar is backed by all the goods and services in the US economy which would also include its energy sector. Furthermore, in 2019 world energy consumption was something on the order of 120,000 terawatt hours. Bitcoin uses ~0.25% of US energy consumption and less than 0.05% of world energy consumption.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jamie-dyer.medium.com&#x2F;why-i-hate-bitcoin-38fad90b37e1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jamie-dyer.medium.com&#x2F;why-i-hate-bitcoin-38fad90b37e...</a>