Why banking uses 56x more energy than Bitcoin | Crypto Stories Ep. 17

It was new to me, the buzz around work. I usually work in security, in banking and payments. So nothing is exposed, everything is confidential. And you do not have like media attention at all. Nobody paid me to do this work. Some people told me, sell it before you publish it. And I'm revealing to you that they put me in contact with people like they can put their logo on the paper. I said, look, really, it took me five, four years. Whatever they will pay me now, after I finished my work, I don't want it. Let the paper be really autonomous, agnostic, independent, and that's its value. And by the way, there are tons of numbers in this paper published for the first time. There are two foundational research parts in it. One of them is how to exactly compute and estimate the bitcoin energy consumption. And the second one, and I think this is the most important one, is for the first time you have a scientific definition of money and payments and you have a definition of energy efficiency of a transaction. The paper has hit all time top 10 download of any scientific journal in any area. I started in information engineering with a very, very concentrated focus on cryptography and security. And when I started, it wasn't that easy. There was no resources easily available. There was even some bans on books that should not leave the United States, for example. So I started in cryptography. It had some fundamental research in it, it had some practical aspects in it, like taking the analog phone call, encrypting them, transforming them into digital, encrypting, transforming back the digital to analog and injecting it to the network.

And then it brought back to me that I won a paper award in 2013 called Rise of Smart Payments because I've done exactly this. I've predicted in 2012 that in 2015 there will be more smartphone holders than card holders in the world. It was like obvious that Apple and Google at that point in 2015 should enter payments industry. It makes sense for them. They'll be a leader. That's what they did. Apple Pay 2015 data is strong. Mathematics is also strong to forecast.

So we were international experts thinking about it. And I came up with the paper of Satoshi Nakamoto telling them, look, I'm into cryptography, guys. And I saw this paper. It's weird because we are 150 and maybe this is one person and he did it. That's why I was immediately convinced of the value of this innovation called Bitcoin. Okay, nobody take it seriously, but this was the first comparison. Now it took me a couple of years until 2014 that the debate came up, central banks were starting to publish papers on Bitcoin saying, it's interesting, it's a money with a memory because you can see the past of each transaction, stuff like that. But it consumes too much energy. We do it with less energy in our industry. I said, are you sure of that? I've visited data centers and they're big. They took almost lakes to cool. I'm not sure that you consume less. So when the debate was starting to pile up, I was just compiling data. It took me from 20, let's say 15 until 2017 to start just compiling some data. But these first data were incomplete, inconsistent. They were not precise about Bitcoin. I didn't have any data how much bitcoin consumes really at that time. I said, okay, we have estimations. Let me try to estimate the banking consumption. And truly I wasn't able. 2017, I had someone in my team also. I told them, look, take two weeks, do nothing, help me with this. It looked like a joke for everyone, but not for me of course. But we were a small payments team and a huge consulting team. So I told them, look, we were working on many confidential projects, but to camouflage what we were doing, put Bitcoin logo on all our PCs and that's what we did. So people were passing through very, very serious people working on cloud transformation, artificial intelligence, payments security, payments innovation was, hey, these people are not serious talking about us, of course. Said, look, I also work at bnb. I also work at Societe General. I also work with Visa and MasterCard on the same projects you are working on. But yeah, this is interesting. You will see someday. Someday you will hear more about Bitco saying, okay, you're wasting your time. What we were trying to do is to compile data but without asking for data because it wasn't really acceptable at all to go and tell people, especially our clients. Could you tell me how much this building consumes of energy? I wasn't at that position to ask for this kind of data. So you cannot collect the data easily. One way was the to see the internal publication. When you are a consultant, you have the right to see some internal communication about the energy efficiency and green efforts that banks are trying to make. So you can start to collect the post of consumption. For example, travel, it costs energy, commute, it generates CO2 emissions. And then you say okay, our data center had made an effort to reduce its energy consumption by X, Y and Z. Well, you still don't have the real consumption, you just have the improvement year over year. If I can know how much year over year that we're trying to improve on that X and Y and Z cost, center commute, data center, server, cooling systems, etc. I can compute the missing variable, how much this data center consumes and that at some point of time you have one data center that says, well, this section of the data center consumes that much. You say, okay, now I can do my math. Now for the banking sector, I started first by ATMs. I started my career working at ATMs. So I was building ATMs, programming ATMs with the big three world constructors, Diebold, Wincor and NCR. I will never go and compare how.

Much time they took to build banks, buildings or ATMs to manufacture the hardware of the ATMs or to bring the.

Metal to do that.

I don't care about the building. I say let's compare the operations and the first sentence of the Satoshi paper say, online payments. He invented this to do online payments. So let's compare cryptocurrency to currency and let's compare payments to payments. How many banknote papers are there in circulation on the planet? This number does not exist. Really much time and effort to calculate it. There are 842 billion banknotes, coins. I did the same estimation. It's like about 1,000 terawatt hour per year to print and mint. And when I say they print money, I don't care about the cost and energy of making the paper. It's a huge. It's like nine times more the number I used. I excluded this. That's why I say all my numbers are underestimated for banking, extremely precise for Bitcoin. People are telling me it's not legitimate to talk about banknotes. You cannot Compare to Bitcoin. Well, 100%. Yes. There's a definition of payments. If you are from the payments industry, you know this. If you are not, you don't know it. Payments are only electronic payments. Okay, you'll tell me. You are contradicting yourself. Where's cash in this business? What is a payment? So we are talking energy. Energy is really codified in science. There's energy, there's power, there's activity, there's force. Science already answered these questions. Now what is payment? Payment is logically between me and you. I'm giving you money from me to you, and in return of a service or good. Now what's really happening physically here, scientifically is I am pushing an electronic version of value from me to you, changing ownership to face A displacement. In physics, work is a differential of energy input, energy output and the delta. The minus between these two is called work. What is a payment? It's a displacement over time of value. And it takes energy to do so. Well, when you go to the ATM to get out cash, you use your credit card, sir, and this goes to the same protocol for EMV. You repay MasterCard and Visa and it goes even to the settlement that the central bank is for. It is complete and electronic payment the cash. So it's 100% in the equation. So I computed also how many ATIMs there are in the world. This is also a number that didn't exist. Same thing ATMs power, energy consumption is precise and the commute is essential. Branches there are today a model where you need to service people on proximity. I'm not insulting them, I'm not saying it's bad. It is good and we want it. I cannot imagine in my village in Lebanon, the bank closes and my parents need to go to the capital to pay cash. I need this service. So we need these branches, but just know that they consume. People need to go to work. And for the first time we know how many people work in the banking industry. These numbers didn't exist. There are 40 million people working directly only on payments and banking. Bitcoin uses consumes 0.05% of world energy production. Banking uses 56 times more energy than Bitcoin. I'm not saying it does less or the same, but just know that banking consumes 56 times more than Bitcoin. The best way to complete this study is to compare on a single transaction. This is the most important point. All the rest, what people have the right to tell you doesn't make sense. Bitcoin does not do what banking system does. The promise is the same, but the delivery is not at the same level. The best way that's what I've done is to how many transactions per year the banking system processes. Okay, Some of them are wire transfers, some of them are withdrawals, some of them are card payments, some of them are ATMs, cash withdrawals. But this is a transaction, an electronic transaction. You take the mass of these transactions per year and you divide it by the energy or the opposite. You divide the energy by the number of this transaction. And now you have a number that the banking industry consumes a little bit less than 2 kilowatt hour per transaction.

And I think this is one of the best results of the paper, actually. The exact estimation of how much Bitcoin consumed over 13 years, almost day per day. You can take any point of time in history and you can know how much bitcoin was consuming at that point in time. Bitcoin consumes an extraordinary amount of energy for an extraordinary amount of security for an extraordinarily important service. Now people can say, I don't care about the service, I don't want electronic money, I don't want bitcoin. Well, that's your right. But someone had invented rockets that can go to the moon. You say you don't care about going to the moon. You want to do poems about the moon and beautiful in the sky and it's like a beautiful girl. Okay, it's your right. But give me the right to go to the moon using a real rocket. Even if it consumes more than a car, it does more. If banking sector tries to become instant, it will be mostly able to treat only 30 billion transactions per year. While bitcoin lightning also in theory is capable of processing 30 trillion, so 1,000 times more. Just in quantity of transactions per year, not in speed. And in speed, Instant payments is 7 seconds, while Lightning is just less than 1 second. So from an energy efficiency point of view, Bitcoin lightning is at least 1 million times more energy efficient. That's why bitcoin lightning is a potential promising technology that needs to prove itself. It.