The thing that everyone misses in these comparisons is that yes that’s the energy that VISA expended to make these transactions but for a crypto currency the energy use isn’t even to make the transaction. In the end each transaction is a few Bytes of data that have no difficulty getting across the world (much like this post or any comment). The energy use is so “high” because that’s is used to secure the currency. And of course that’s a much harder comparison to make but a fairer one.

How much energy does the the banking system actually use? How much energy is used to secure the US dollar for example?

You have to account for the entirety of it. That’s like saying that F1 doesn’t pollute all that much because they use bio fuel and the cars are very energy efficient, completely disregarding the fact that the majority of the pollution is in the constant global shipping of cars and gear, as well as R & D

Ethereum did approximately 1.1m transactions a day. Visa did approximately 660m a day.

Small difference lol

Probably, but Ethereum does a lot of things that Visa can't. Visa transactions are exceedingly simple. It was just the only generally comparable thing I could think of that I could get energy figures for, do you know of any better examples?

On the flip side, global banking processes something like 5+ orders of magnitude more transactions than ETH, so even at the low end it’s 1000x more efficient than the most well known POS coin.

Where did I say I was disagreeing with you, mate?