Re: Sustainability of Bitcoin and Blockchain

> On 27 Jan 2016, at 20:28, alexandre.monnin@web-and-philosophy.org wrote:
> 
> 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.

yes.
The web is a hypertextual system for which mail is one interface. Conversations go on
everywhere, including here for example:

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webpayments/2016Jan/0084.html

> 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 21:22:40 UTC