1) The Yemen number is for the whole system. The energy to send one transaction is tiny and much smaller than using the existing remittances system.
2) With a bank, it's not even clear you could send $5 to Yemen as there's a civil war going on. And if you did find a money transfer company willing to do it, it would be very expensive. With Bitcoin, as long as the person in Yemen has a phone and can get online, you can send them any amount, it will cost ~$2, and take minutes to do.
My favourite benefit of Bitcoin is bypassing the hideously inefficient and corrupt Wall Street financial vampiric system that provided the world with the Global Financial Crisis for which it suffered the punishment of being given billions of dollars by the US Government.
Attacking another user like this (edit: and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28567074 - yikes!) will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. Whether or not you owe that person better, you definitely owe this community better if you're posting to it—much better. So no more of this, please—we're trying to have an internet forum that doesn't burn itself to a crisp.
Please get some perspective. Read more actual facts and data from various different angles, you've obviously dived deep into one side with little consideration for any other.
You give me the kind opportunity to quote a favourite lyric of mine:
The do-er and the thinker: no allowance for the other
The append-only ledger is surprisingly efficient, to the point where you can process the entire thing on a decent laptop in a couple days.
And judging the costs bank are able to charge for international wires, even when comparing them to the horrendous fees for Bitcoin (Core, BTC) on-chain transactions, I'm not convinced Bitcoin is that much less efficient.
- inviolable property rights
- sound money enables accurate investment valuation and less inflation and wealth inequality
- low cost, high security, international final settlement
- instant payments on lightning network
Once you find out you'll panic about not having enough. The benefits are apparent when analyzed from the perspective of money as a technology that enables strong property rights defended by cryptography. Robert Breedlove does a podcast on the nature of money which great. This video also does a great job of addressing the "waste" by elaborating on "unforgable costliness" : https://youtu.be/b-7dMVcVWgc
All of these "uses energy per transaction" people are being underserved by their news sources on the development of the lightning network, which is like going from a LAN with global broadcast to NATed and routed TCP/IP (Bitcoin is a global broadcast layer and lightning is a transaction bundling / routing layer/network). I mean an entire country has adopted it and we still have folks on hacker news missing the disruption for the trees!
