Bitcoin: 288,000 daily payments and energy use exceeding Switzerland

Bitcoin processes 288,000 payments a day and consumes more than Switzerland

There is an uncomfortable way to test if a currency works: try using it. The Bitcoin network moves about 2,000 transactions per minute, which means 288,000 a day, and keeping it running costs more electricity than Switzerland consumes. An entire country's worth of energy for a service that falls short when put under pressure.

With those figures on the table, the question stops being philosophical. Can something be called the money of the future if it cannot handle the payments of a medium-sized Spanish city and forces users to wait during peak hours? This is not about faith; it is about arithmetic.

288,000 payments a day: capacity for a city of 144,000 inhabitants

The calculation is simple and brutal. 288,000 daily transactions are enough for a city of 144,000 inhabitants—the size of Huelva—if each resident makes two payments a day. No margin, no buffer. And during peak activity hours, payment processing is delayed by hours.

In translation: the system teeters on the brink of collapse with the activity of a medium-sized city. For a larger city, or for several countries at once, the math does not add up. There is no highway with extra lanes: there are only the existing ones, and they are few. Any second-layer alternative also requires at least one validation on the main chain.

How long would it take a country to convert all its money to bitcoin?

Here the numbers become a cruel joke. The 162 days it would take Spaniards to swap their fiat money for bitcoin with the network dedicated exclusively to them is just the first stage. It would take nearly 5 years for the inhabitants of the European Union to do the same. And 71 years would be needed to migrate the money of the entire planet.

During that timeframe, people would continue to be born who need their own initial transaction, while the network would attend to no other payments. As a medium of exchange, it does not exist during that time. The figure often cited as the final blow—73 consecutive years, minute by minute, without a single hiccup—is a patience exercise that no real monetary system has ever demanded of its users.

Why is bitcoin said to be a store of value and not a medium of exchange?

Defenders argue that its primary goal is not to compete with card networks, but to function as a store of value due to its limited and known issuance. The three classic functions of money—medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value—are separated, admitting that the asset excels in the third.

They maintain that processing capacity has improved with Segwit, batching—grouping multiple payments into a single transaction—and the Lightning Network, which essentially amounts to signing checks rather than cashing them. Parallel chains built on top are also being experimented with. The problem is that none of this eliminates the input queue, and billing in bitcoins remains a rarity.

Energy cost: more than Switzerland for inadequate service

The second pillar of the argument is electrical. Keeping the network operational exceeds the consumption of a country like Switzerland, and that expenditure would not cover the payments of a city of over 100,000 people without delays. Energy enters the conversation from the uncomfortable side: not for what it enables, but for what it fails to achieve.

The usual counter-argument is that gold processes zero payments and nobody demands estimulante ilegal from it. True. But gold does not carry a protocol that fixes its maximum capacity by design, and here the symmetry breaks: what is a technical limitation in one case is simply a physical characteristic in the other.

Tether and concentrated mining: issues swept under the rug

There are two shadows rarely faced head-on. The first is Tether, the stablecoin that certain analyses point to as the ecosystem's everyday weak spot: a unit that might not even require backing in fiat money and acts as an accounting crutch to sustain the whole. There is no official resolution backing this suspicion, but neither are there data that completely disprove it.

The second is the mining imbalance, with fruta power highly concentrated geographically. For years it was sold as the greatest risk—the antiestéticared 51% attack—and today it is barely mentioned. That a problem stops being discussed does not miccionan it has been resolved.

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The discussion about price and the discussion about value still fail to meet, and that is the knot. An asset can rise for years without answering whether it serves to pay for bread. How much would the service have to fail before we stop calling it money and start calling it something else?