You are leaving out significant amounts of energy consumed in the legacy financial system.
Those bills cost energy to produce. The bank had to be built. There was a teller there, did they spend any energy driving to the bank that day? Did you use a duffel bag? Where’d that come from? Etc.
I’m not sure that any of this is meaningful in any way.
They include air travel and whatnot. Basically the whole energy consumption of the company. Also including building stuff etc.
Visa doesn't share that in order to poke at Bitcoin. They share that because enviromentalism is hip nowadays. So they want to tell how they're improving their CO2 emissions as a company.
The mining equipment needed to be produced. The mining rig needed to be installed, many factories needed to be produced. There are workers in these mines, did they spend energy driving a car? Did they use a gym bag? Where did that come from?
Then you might as well price in the cost of the computers and GPUs assembly into Bitcoin's cost. I don't see the utility in going down this chain of production.
How many people go speak to a bank teller to transfer funds? My bank can give me a mortgage for my home. The banking system is doing way way way more than counting how much people own and shifting that around.
If the concern is the cost of brick and mortar banks then we can solve that with technology much more effectively than btc.
The problem with "interventionistas" with little/no understanding of bitcoin is, they look at one feature/component of btc's game theory in isolation and state "I can do this particular thing cheaper/faster/easier" while ignoring the 100 other aligned incentive structures that are lost with their 2nd/3rd-order-effect altering solutions.
Bitcoin is too elegantly designed to approach in this fashion.
Which is also true on the opposite side or did your mining rig magically materialize out of nowhere? The difference is that a lot of the infrastructure for the traditional system is already built out which reduces the marginal energy costs to a degree that isn't the case for cryptocurrencies.
> Those bills cost energy to produce. The bank had to be built. There was a teller there, did they spend any energy driving to the bank that day? Did you use a duffel bag?
It's 2021. Carrying around duffel bags of paper bills received from a human bank teller is not how anyone manages their cash or transactions.
Bitcoin is not the only way to digitally transact. It's not even a good way. In practice, it's just about the worst way to handle transactions unless you have no other options.
This "legacy financial system" comparison isn't fair. I use standard banking and haven't been to a bank in years. I think a more reasonable comparison is with online only banks. Our current system doesn't actually need physical cash. You just need banks keeping score for individual accounts and a central bank keeping score of the banks' accounts.
Those bills cost energy to produce. The bank had to be built. There was a teller there, did they spend any energy driving to the bank that day? Did you use a duffel bag? Where’d that come from? Etc.
Just like the mining rigs that produce bitcoin. It seems like you're conflating fixed costs (of plant and machinery) with marginal costs (of exchanging some amount of BTC vs fiat).
If you compare the money (resources) spent bitcoin mining and the money (resources) spent operating the world’s central banks, then the costs are similar.
The main function of the banks is lending and other services, not payments. In a retail bank just a tiny fraction of employees and budget are used for handling payments, it's a necessary piece of infrastructure for every bank but it's not a particularly large part of it.
Money is intended to transact with, not for speculation on it increasing purchasing power, which is great, because it can be spent on or invested in things which create value instead. And at a rate of more than 10 transactions per second worldwide!
Someone should tell all the people who've studied numismatics for their entire life! Even the etymology of the word "money" derives from the location of the mint in Rome.
You'll forgive me for sticking with the definition of money used by all academic experts in the field and the vast majority of colloquial use...
Incidentally, Bitcoin is also not a commodity in the general sense of the word (as opposed to the CFTC thinks it should regulate it like other exotic financial instruments sense of the word)
Sure, just one change... ”Currency is intended to transact with, not for speculation...”
Bitcoin is forcing an expansion of the definition of money. A self-regulated financial network backed by tremendous amounts of hardware and electricity is "advanced money".
We are at a transition point so I don't expect good labeling/categorization from the shortsighted/incumbents/fiat-boomers (directed at the gatekeepers, not you personally).
Side note: What people complaining about electricity consumption don't get is, BTC transfers the uncounterfeitable properties of energy to a money.
Sorry, the English language is distributed consensus based, and so you don't get to torture it into redefining money as "digital tulip bulbs" or condescendingly dismiss people using the term correctly until you have the numbers to mount a 51% attack. :)
Side note: what people don't get is that pretending tokens have more exchange value because more energy was expended than the printing of other tokens is just sunk cost fallacy.
The distinction between money and currency is not up for debate, it is settled.
>BTC transfers the uncounterfeitable properties of energy to a money.
This statement has a lot more depth than you seem to appreciate. I believe this is from a lack of understanding of BTC's incentive structure. Perhaps a few years from now you will gain enough of an understanding...Almost every thinking-person was in the position you are in (skeptic) at some point before an extended education and eventual full BTC adoption.
The sooner you get this education the better for your family, so I recommend diving deep sooner than later, even if you still end up as a "nocoiner".
Final Note: I expect clean energy regulations and BTC's hunger for hashrate will create a larger (more direct) market for cleaner energy and faster processing, which is a win-win for humanity.
"More Direct Market" clarification: Selling clean electricity to a power grid is much harder than selling it to the BTC network, especially in remote areas. The ability to easily monetize energy production on small/mid/large scales makes experimentation and innovation more likely.
Example: Many facilities now mine Bitcoin with otherwise flared waste gas and the controlled burn actually leads to less negative environmental impact.
Those bills cost energy to produce. The bank had to be built. There was a teller there, did they spend any energy driving to the bank that day? Did you use a duffel bag? Where’d that come from? Etc.
I’m not sure that any of this is meaningful in any way.