Quote from: DannyHamilton on December 14, 2017, 07:35:15 PM

Quote from: jnano on December 14, 2017, 07:26:40 PM

Quote from: DannyHamilton on December 14, 2017, 03:43:43 PM

Then to be intellectually honest about it, at a minimum, you need to also use:
Total number of blocks in the blockchain: 499273 (as I'm typing this)

Okay, so you did mean in the more philosophical sense. In that case, the problem with the current system versus traditional ones is that maintaining the historical ledger has high continuous power requirements. And potentially the requirements increase over time, although they might plateau at some point.

And how does that compare to the costs of operating all the banking buildings in the world? All the banking employees? All the vaults, safes, and armored cars? All the payment processing systems? The production of all the currency? All the forces necessary to protect, regulate, and enforce that system?

This is my point.

People are looking at the entire cost of everything necessary to keep the bitcoin system running, and dividing it by the number of transactions in a single block. That is not a reasonable way to do it if you want to compare to the "traditional system".

This is a great misconception about Bitcoin, that a lot of people are suffering. I think this should be a sticky here and on bitcoin.org, also because I am tired to explain this over and over again.