Sustainability of Bitcoin and Blockchain

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, 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

Received on Wednesday, 27 January 2016 10:10:09 UTC