Re: Sustainability of Bitcoin and Blockchain

Hi Henry,

Le Wed, 27 Jan 2016 11:09:35 +0100, Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net>  
a écrit:

> Hi,
>
>   I'd be very interested in research on the sustainability of bitcoin  
> and blockchain.
> This should be a very good initial research topic for this group,

By "this group" you mean the Web We Can Afford CG? ;) Then we should move  
the conversation there.

I agree that this is a worthy topic!

Cheers,
A.

as it
> is a protocol
> that works on the internet and is most directly of interest to  
> economists, and so
> will get their direct interest too. There are also many claims that the  
> block chain can
> be the underpinning for a new internet.
>
> Here is an initial article claiming that bitcoin is not sustainable:
> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/bitcoin-is-unsustainable
> It claims that 1 transaction uses up the energy of 1.5 households per
> day and that this is 5 thousand times less energy efficient than a credit
> card transaction. The article also points to another study that claims  
> that
> the blockchain is 99% more efficient than the banking sector, though that
> one takes the whole banking sector into account, including if I read  
> correctly
> the bank branches, ATM, employees, etc...
>
> Of course the bitcoin algorithm is perhaps not the last word.
> Tony Arciery in "The death of bitcoin" points to a number of other  
> alogrithms in
> this space:
>   https://tonyarcieri.com/the-death-of-bitcoin
>
> The Blockchain technology is getting a lot of attention recently. See  
> for example
> the UK Government's Office of Science report just released
> "Distributed Ledger Technology: beyond block chain"
> https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/492972/gs-16-1-distributed-ledger-technology.pdf
>
> The issues here are clearly complex. But if a methodology can be found  
> to answer this question
> in the blockchain world, where it will certainly get a lot of review and  
> inspection, and if
> after getting this review and inspection it succeeded at achieving  
> consensus, then that process
> could certainly be used to look at sustainability in other areas of the  
> web.
>
> Henry


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Received on Wednesday, 27 January 2016 20:29:08 UTC