"A single transaction takes as much electricity as 800,000 VISA transactions, or watching 50,000 hours of youtube videos."
Respectfully, I'd like to call BS on those points. I'm surprised to find these assertions in a post this highly ranked on HN.
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Seems low TBH. Bitcoin is astonishingly, ridiculously inefficient and people's minds just seem to bounce off the numbers because they're so ludicrous. and before you try to say 'well the financial industry also uses a lot of energy', consider that the bitcoin network uses about as much energy as the entire financial industry (the servers, people, offices, everything). One basically runs the world's economy, the other can do 7 transactions a second.
Yeah really depends on how deep your effect tree is. I made this point in another post but the human-hours/waste required to keep VISA running should be taken into account. Also the power put into BTC is used to secure the network- it isn't exactly "wasted."
And one can heat a house now while mining on the north.