It probably cost a few billion dollars to build all those banks globally. It costs a few hundred million to maintain all those banks and vaults. However, these banks and vaults can handle more than 2000x the transactions of Bitcoin in a single day (Visa on its own is 750x the capacity of Bitcoin, and Mastercard handles about twice the number of transactions as Visa), so Bitcoin would need to be at least 1/2000th the price to build and maintain the network to maintain a comparative economic advantage against just those two companies. Including the entire financial system, Bitcoin would need to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000x cheaper and more efficient.
And since we're taking into account all of the underlying systemic costs going into banks, we need to do the same for Bitcoin. That means including all of the power utilities, factories, and mining facilities that went into making the hardware, plus the cost of shipping the hardware worldwide, plus the cost of the utilities and transmission lines needed to operate the network. And that's clearly not 1/20,000th the cost or resource usage of our current financial system.
> It costs a few hundred million to maintain all those banks and vaults.
There are ~8000 banks in the US alone, around 15K around the world.
According to your made up number, it costs $6K/year to run a bank. That's not even remotely close. That would pay maybe a month of the desk clerk's salary + overhead.
Fort Knox has an entire military base to secure it. That alone would use up a good chunk of your few hundred million dollar budget. I think you are vastly underestimating the cost in supporting our current financial system.
> You don't consider a country's reserve assets to be a factor in their monetary system?
The U.S. dollar isn't backed by gold. The total value of the gold at Fort Knox, about $100 billion, is negligible [1] and does not appear on the Federal Reserve's balance sheet [2]. It is mostly an anachronism from the eras of the gold standard.
The global financial system is interconnected. Fast transactions can happen because counter party risk is removed by a government backstop. In effect you can't have Visa without a "risk free" store of value. Vaults such as Fort Knox are a part of that system.
In the case of bitcoin they aren't inherently necessary to the function of the system, although with the risk of hacks you can make the case for them.
And since we're taking into account all of the underlying systemic costs going into banks, we need to do the same for Bitcoin. That means including all of the power utilities, factories, and mining facilities that went into making the hardware, plus the cost of shipping the hardware worldwide, plus the cost of the utilities and transmission lines needed to operate the network. And that's clearly not 1/20,000th the cost or resource usage of our current financial system.