Visa issues annual "Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability" reports, which include detailed accounting of Visa's energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, etc. Mastercard issues a similar report. So do big banks like Chase and Citi.
So...challenge accepted?
(If you actually read these reports and compare with Bitcoin, the thing that will immediately stand out is how many orders of magnitude more energy Bitcoin consumes per transactions than the mainstream electronic payments networks.)
Off chain transactions, whether thinks like lightning network or centralized exchanges, make it very difficult to actually know how much value transfer is happening. As the network scales up, these kinds of transactions will increasingly make up a greater percentage of all value transfer, while easily measurable base chain settlement transactions will be a minority.
You're right, for the same reason that articles like the op's aren't entirely accurate either. Nothing is perfect, however it is easy to consider that global finance is orders of magnitude more wasteful than bitcoin. Just imagine all the bank tellers (transaction validators) driving to work each day.
It is always interesting to me how other PoW chains are completely ignored in the general hatred. ETH mining is a massive consumer of electricity, but since that is supposed to be ending some day, nobody seems to care.
The end solution might eventually be to tokenize all btc, on top of eth.
> Just imagine all the bank tellers (transaction validators) driving to work each day.
Don't forget the Proof of Violence that secures the fiat monetary system. The US military is the largest institutional consumer of oil on the planet.
> It is always interesting to me how other PoW chains are completely ignored in the general hatred.
And simultaneously, bitcoin still gets blamed for GPU prices, even though that's Ethereum and other alts.
> The end solution might eventually be to tokenize all btc, on top of eth.
Highly unlikely. There are good arguments for why PoS will never fully replace PoW. I think it's more likely that all the altcoin use cases get rebased as second layers anchored into bitcoin's PoW.
Try that with global finance.
updated: for clarity.