<span style="color:#323232;">150 TWh / year
</span><span style="color:#323232;">————————— = 0,75 TWh / user / year
</span><span style="color:#323232;">200 million users
</span>
Banking system
Users
There are over 8 billion people on the planet today, let’s assume 4 billion of them have access to the global banking system.
Total energy consumption
The global banking system used an estimated 264 TWh in 2021[1]
If we assume the same consumption increase rate for banking, that’s about 348 TWh/year currently.
Energy consumption per user
<span style="color:#323232;">348 TWh / year
</span><span style="color:#323232;">————————— = 0,087 TWh / user / year
</span><span style="color:#323232;">4.000 million users
</span>
With these numbers, bitcoin uses almost 10x the energy per user annually.
There are of course a myriad of things one can argue over whether it makes a fair comparison, none of which I feel like arguing, since this is just a really simple estimate with a lot of assumptions.
1: I used the numbers in this article uncritically, if you have better numbers you can run your own calculations.