Hector Martin

maybe i am wrong to this number i had not time to confirm it but even with 410w USA ATM for sure uses the same power as every house in develop world use or all of ATM's of USA use the same power as a small country. And we talk about one single country.

ATMs are an interesting case because they are one of the less efficient parts

if you consider solely point-of-sale transactions, traditional banking uses much less energy

and actually even if traditional banking uses more energy overall, it doesn't help *efficiency*

the traditional banking system can process several orders of magnitude more transactions

And ATMs do more anyway. That's dealing with physical cash. We already have cash-less centralized banking systems. Comparing Bitcoin to the cash-based economy and not the cashless economy is not a fair comparison.

similarly, points of sale worldwide consume massive amounts of power in aggregate, but that'd be true regardless of the payment system used

Bitcoin points of sale (real ones participating in the network) would use way more energy than traditional ones anyway. You can't run bitcoind on a tiny embedded platform with megabytes of storage.