You can go estimate it yourself pretty easily based on number of branches and some average energy use per square foot (pick the US’s commercial average as a upper bound to be conservative)
But to summarize as someone who works in energy related research:
All the banks in the world combined do not use as much energy as bitcoin alone now.
Cryptocurrencies are inherently non-productive work as their algorithms are designed to solely be computationally expensive to create a means of artificial scarcity.
Block chain isn’t the problem, non-productive hashing algorithms are.
I don't know much about energy network and power consumption of average Joe in Argentina/Slovenia/Greenland, so this article doesn't tell me much. Is that because 25% of a country doesn't have access to stable electricity, so energy requirements to run a country are small? Are their electric and electronic devices are mostly power efficient? Do they use a lot of geothermal heating without using electricity and gas to produce heat or cold, so energy use of a country isn't the same of another country in a different location? Are their energy providers close to cities, so less energy is lost in transit? Do they have home-based wind/solar power generators skipped from equation due to relaxed regulations?
Energy consumption in the UK dropped by 12.9% during COVID pandemic[1]. Is that enough to stop people blaming BTC for everything bad on energy market and pollution? That was _easy_ to fix.
I agree hashing and PoW protocols are crap and I even think they should be banned, but
let's start adding to this discussion other things, like how bad USD and traditional banking systems are. We talk even less often about international banks money laundering with ISIS, Al-Qaeda and Mexican drug cartels, hello all HSBC and Deutsche bank employees! I'm sure we have a lot of easier targets (still talking about ecological damage and pollution) to fix than networks like Bitcoin [2].
I would love some proof that all the computers that power all the bank and credit transactions, and all the financial derivatives they produce, don't add up to the power consumption of crypto.
Then I would take into account how PoS would affect this in the future, as crypto is a technology that is meant to be built on, evolved, upgraded, and replaced by something better. Like money.
Then probably ask which system is more democratic in its distribution and transparency of the money, and I would bet that system would finance less legacy climate destroying industries
You can go estimate it yourself pretty easily based on number of branches and some average energy use per square foot (pick the US’s commercial average as a upper bound to be conservative)
Bitcoin consumes 'more electricity than Argentina' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56012952
But to summarize as someone who works in energy related research:
All the banks in the world combined do not use as much energy as bitcoin alone now.
Cryptocurrencies are inherently non-productive work as their algorithms are designed to solely be computationally expensive to create a means of artificial scarcity.
Block chain isn’t the problem, non-productive hashing algorithms are.