Does anyone have any figures on what regular banking systems use for accepted/official currencies? I feel like this has blown up so much that it makes sense to compare and contrast.
Bitcoin provides very few of the services that regular banking systems do, and to a far, far smaller audience. Unless that's taken into account, such a comparison is meaningless.
Argentina has 45 million inhabitants. Bitcoin has like 300k transactions per day. Every person in Argentina could do three transactions per year (300e3/45e6×365) and it would already exceed the transaction count of Bitcoin. Yet Argentina's banking system uses less energy than Argentina, and so their banking system must be more efficient than Bitcoin.
That's assuming that a transaction comparison even makes sense, which it doesn't really because:
Bitcoin is not a currency. People use it as a way of getting rich, which they could also do with any other currency by just having a limited number of numbered paper bills, some guarantee that no more will ever be printed (e.g. agree that nobody will use a bill number higher than 10 million), and publishing on a forum who owns a specific bill number. It doesn't need proof-of-work to function as an investment scheme.
I doubt counting this per transaction volume will yield close results, mining is computation intensive by design.
Absolutes are a curiosity, but comparing those is not constructive imho
Nursie|5 years ago
tgv|5 years ago
lucb1e|5 years ago
That's assuming that a transaction comparison even makes sense, which it doesn't really because:
Bitcoin is not a currency. People use it as a way of getting rich, which they could also do with any other currency by just having a limited number of numbered paper bills, some guarantee that no more will ever be printed (e.g. agree that nobody will use a bill number higher than 10 million), and publishing on a forum who owns a specific bill number. It doesn't need proof-of-work to function as an investment scheme.
unkulunkulu|5 years ago