Bitcoin Forum

I'm just curious how many financial offices there are in the world and how much energy they use compared to ASIC miners?

That's an interesting question. Here in the Philippines there are tens of thousands of financial employees to serve over 100 million people. Each person consumes at least as much energy as an ASIC during their working life. They run air conditioning, drive cars, and use computers. We don't have as many of the big fancy lobbies and conference rooms that rich countries have. I would guess that just the Philippine financial offices use more energy than all the Bitcoin miners in the world combined.

It's really a crime that banks are allowed to destroy the environment this way. Wouldn't it be nice if they could tear down big financial office buildings and create parks and wildlife refuges instead?

we're not even close yet but if Bitcoin keeps going for another few years I would think it would be

Agreed to that.. Bitcoin will be there. It will not close.. It will stay..

Yes, I think so. But you can't ignore the significant role the bank bring to us in the daily life. Can you imagine our daily life withou bank at the moment? I think it is terrible.

lol, what?

Yeah, banks are really great, rah rah lets go rapists! Rape us! Rape us! Rape us! (crowd chanting)

Open your eyes dude, take off the goggles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_reserve_banking

Or if words and numbers arent friendly to you, try this video version (28,730 likes, 826 dislikes!):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFDe5kUUyT0

+1

Xposted from similar topic, mods please delete/merge threads/posts as necessary

Every new generation of ASIC is vastly more power efficient. Can the same be said for every bank branch or finance employee?

Bitcoin enables efficiency gains orders of magnitude above printing, distributing, and then finally destroying billions of notes of paper currency.

This is just STEP 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaBapDvfwFw

During Fiscal Year (FY) 2013, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing delivered approximately 26 million notes a day with a face value of approximately $1.3 billion.
 
During Fiscal Year (FY) 2013, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing delivered approximately 6.6 billion notes at an average cost of 10 cents per note.
 
Over 90 percent of the notes that the BEP delivers each year are used to replace notes already in, or taken out of circulation.
 
Between the Fort Worth, Texas and the Washington, DC facilities, approximately 9.6 tons of ink per day were used during FY 2013.

http://www.moneyfactory.gov/uscurrency/annualproductionfigures.html

haha, nicely put.  :D

If you're comparing the energy used for Bitcoin to that of the main stream system, it's more than just the energy to build, then run a bank.   You need to consider all sorts of things like the energy of printing the cash, energy to drive it around in armoured cars from place to place, fill atm's etc.  When you add it it up, there is no comparison really.  Bitcoin is far more efficient than banks.

Not a fan of banks. But you will have to agree that banks do a lot more than money transfers.
It would be more accurate to compare Bitcoin to Western Union locations...

I think you have to have a loose grasp on many concepts to even ask this question.

Do Post Offices use more energy than an email server?  Do bicycle messengers sweat more than fax machines?

In the USA, Post Offices are being closed in favor of parcel services. Many towns don't have them anymore. Besides, you can't email Grandma's cookies, but you can email and sign a contract. I didn't know bicycle messengers could deliver messages overseas, or was that a strawman?

Banks don't do anything that can't be done by a machine.

I believe that in terms of electric cost to secure each dollar equivalent, bitcoin is more efficient (measured by market cap of bitcoin verses the amount of cash on deposit at banks). Banks need to secure both their physical cash and their electronic records, both of which take up a lot of electricity and resources.

You also forgot to ask about the credit card companies and interbank systems. Without credit cards banks would be much less efficient in clearing payments so this cost should be included as the total electric use as well.

Agreed.  Thank you for reiterating my point!

Post offices almost certainly use many time the energy (and cost even more to operate) then email servers. If you are looking to reduce our overall energy footprint it would probably be best to close many/most post offices in favor of using email more and using reduced post office 'foot print' in favor of shipping parcels (packages)

Banks don't do anything that can't be done by a machine.
[/quote]To make an accurate comparison you would need to measure the amount held by banks, the amount transferred by banks, the amount transferred by places like WU, and the total energy consumption of all banks and MSBs like WU. You would then compare the amounts transacted with bitcoin (actual economical transactions) and the market cap of bitcoin with the energy consumption of ASICs and the energy consumption required to keep private keys safe 

Those numbers have been roughly extrapolated. It will need to grow by a few orders of magnitude, but not much more. I think the OP was a little simplistic in comparing a person to an ASIC. It's not like anyone would ever replace a human job with a machine. While it's possible that Bitcoin's currency status will falter because fees get too high, Bitcoin metacoins will easily handle all electronic global transactions with machine precision and be fully automated. Bitcoin itself will not need to grow infinitely because local off blockchain servers and sidechains will mitigate tasking Bitcoin miners with trivial purchases.