When it says transaction, is it referring to one person sending bitcoins to another person, or something else? Is that much energy really required confirm just one transaction?
I'm also wondering whether the energy requirement depends on the amount of bitcoins being sent as well.
No, that is total bollocks and utter bullshit on her part. That is exaggeration at its finest to make bitcoins look awful compared to other traditional payment systems. If that was the case, do you think miners would still keep on mining if a
single transaction would be that expensive to hash? No, absolutely not. As of this writing, bitcoin's transaction per second is set @ 4.64, so this girl mean to say that in every second, bitcoin farms are burning 1392 KWh of energy for
4 transactions? It just doesn't add up.