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Author: Admin | 2025-04-27
Hours of operation. VISA data centers are assumed to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days per year, for a total of 8,760 hours per year.We estimate the electricity consumption of the VISA network to be 0.84 TWh/yr. In 2019, VISA processed 185.5 billion transactions of the total 441.0 billion transactions. We estimate the global annual electricity consumption required for all card networks to operate to be 2.00 TWh/yr.This analysis does not take into account the electricity consumption for all card network’s office buildings. Summary of the Banking System Energy UsageElectricity data for the banking industry is scarce. With the publicly available information that we could find, we estimate the banking system uses 263.72 TWh of energy each year. Deriving a comprehensive number for this sector’s energy consumption would require individual banks to self-report.Even in aggregate, a comparison between Bitcoin and the layers of the banking system is inherently flawed. The traditional financial stack is a complicated hierarchy of counterparties and intermediate settlement. Credit card networks are great for exchanging fast payments and IOUs, but they depend on the banking system for settlement, and the banking system in turn depends on central banks for final settlement, which in turn depends on the dollarsystem as a whole.In the interest of scope, we have excluded central banks, clearinghouses (like the DTCC), and other aspects of the traditional financial system from the above analysis. It is important to note that this audit is only a slice of the entire system—the overall energy usage of the banking system is unknown and externalities are excluded.Defining the banking system’s utility by its energy usage is reductive—overlooking the benefits of transferring large quantities of money. While it may seem practical to compare the banking system and Bitcoin on the number of transactions they process, the two have different scaling properties. The banking system scales with transaction count, requiring additional infrastructure as it grows. Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s energy consumption scales not bytransaction count, but by network economics. So What?These statistics provide interesting context, but how do they help us answer the initial question: Is the Bitcoin network’s electricity consumption an acceptable use of energy?Although we can estimate and compare the magnitude of different industries’ energy usage, the question is still fundamentally a value judgment. One’s answer depends on their beliefs about the utility of bitcoin. Value is in the Eye of the BeholderValue is subjective,
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