Blockchain vs global warming

OK, so let’s do some math. According to https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/cash-vs-credit-cards-which-do-american-use-most/ online purchases should hit $638 billion in 2022. These purchases use payment gateways to hand over the money from clients to businesses. Credit card operators are charging each transaction from 1.15% + $0.05. Of course, gateways like PayPal and similar are often charging more but for simplification, let’s take the lower that is 1.15%. It makes $7.3 billion in transactions costs. As a comparison let’s take the Solana network (Blockchain solution). The average transaction fee on that chain is $0.00025. Depending on a source an average online transaction is around $112, so the Solanas % fee would be 0.00022%. If it would replace the traditional payment methods that overall fee would drop to $1,4 million. If we would replace the traditional online payment methods with a Solana solution then the $7.3 billion credit cards fees could be spent on something else.

For example trees. Planting a single tree costs $0.85 based on https://onetreeplanted.org/blogs/stories/how-much-does-it-cost-to-plant-a-tree, so you could get around 8.6 billion trees planted. Based on the https://8billiontrees.com/trees/how-many-trees-cut-down-each-year/ we are losing 15 billion trees each year. This means that the money from the payment switch could regenerate over 57% of total trees cut down. Quite outstanding I would say.