Re: Sustainability of Bitcoin and Blockchain

On 27 January 2016 at 11:09, Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net> wrote:

> 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.
>

Isnt a problem, bitcoin can handle all the transactions on the planet.  You
just move them from on block to off block.  Fees are affordable.  Storage
will get cheaper, as will computing power.

It's waaaaaaay cheaper than the current banking system.


>
> Henry
>