Since these arguments started to crop up I have been wondering how much energy is used in legitimate banking and credit card transactions. I would imagine for a given number of transactions the banking and CC would have to be more efficient due to economy of scale alone. But would that still be true given a similar scale for crypto (not necessarily BTC)?
Crypto-miners have to be acutely aware of energy spent to make it profitable and CC/Banking is working with basically unlimited funds and can easily sacrifice energy in favor of other priorities to increase profits. For instance, a significant portion of banking infrastructure takes place on systems using FORTRAN or COBOL for various reasons, and I wonder if older less efficient hardware/software might not be one of those factors.
Does it cost less or more for banks to store, transmit, and calculate transactions than it does using blockchain technology?