• unlawfulbooger@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    6 months ago

    Exactly, if we do a back of the napkin calculation:

    Bitcoin

    Users

    There are 200 million bitcoin wallets, let’s be generous and say those are all owned by unique individuals.

    Total energy consumption

    Bitcoin used about 114 TWh in 2021[1]

    Bitcoin currently uses about 150 TWh annually

    Energy consumption per user

    150 TWh / year 
    ————————— = 0,75 TWh / user / year
    200 million users
    

    Banking system

    Users

    There are over 8 billion people on the planet today, let’s assume 4 billion of them have access to the global banking system.

    Total energy consumption

    The global banking system used an estimated 264 TWh in 2021[1]

    If we assume the same consumption increase rate for banking, that’s about 348 TWh/year currently.

    Energy consumption per user

    348 TWh / year 
    ————————— = 0,087 TWh / user / year
    4.000 million users
    

    With these numbers, bitcoin uses almost 10x the energy per user annually.

    There are of course a myriad of things one can argue over whether it makes a fair comparison, none of which I feel like arguing, since this is just a really simple estimate with a lot of assumptions.

    1: I used the numbers in this article uncritically, if you have better numbers you can run your own calculations.