person:robert hill

Can blockchain technology help poor people around the world?
▻http://theconversation.com/can-blockchain-technology-help-poor-people-around-the-world-76059

In my work as a scholar of business and technology focusing on the impact of blockchain and other modern technologies such as cloud computing, big data and the Internet of Things on poor people, I see four main ways blockchain systems are already beginning to connect some of the world’s poorest people with the global economy.

The downside of blockchain
▻http://www.infodrivenbusiness.com/post.php?post=/2016/04/29/the-downside-of-blockchain

by Robert Hillard

Imagine an invention that deliberately wasted resources. Maybe a car that burns oil just to create smoke that is easy to see or an electric light that uses twice as much energy to avoid burning out. That’s exactly what blockchain is doing, consuming large amounts of electricity for no purpose other than making fraud prohibitively expensive.

I recently had the privilege of collaborating with my colleagues from the Australian Deloitte Centre for the Edge on a report looking into distributed ledgers and the blockchain technology. Reading the result, it is striking how far we still have to go to invent our digital business future.

As a quick reminder, blockchain is a technology to support the exchange of value or contracts in an environment where anonymity is important and no one is to be trusted. The best known application of blockchain is in the exchange of Bitcoins, a virtual currency.

Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index - Digiconomist
▻https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

Key Network Statistics

Description Value
Bitcoin’s current estimated annual electricity consumption* (TWh) 51.82
Annualized global mining revenues $8,109,412,566
Annualized estimated global mining costs $2,590,786,398
Country closest to Bitcoin in terms of electricity consumption Uzbekistan
Estimated electricity used over the previous day (KWh) 141,960,899
Implied Watts per GH/s 0.232
Total Network Hashrate in PH/s (1,000,000 GH/s) 25,475
Electricity consumed per transaction (KWh) 772.00
Number of U.S. households that could be powered by Bitcoin 4,797,753
Number of U.S. households powered for 1 day by the electricity consumed for a single transaction 26.09
Bitcoin’s electricity consumption as a percentage of the world’s electricity consumption 0.23%
Annual carbon footprint (kt of CO2) 25,390
Carbon footprint per transaction (kg of CO2) 378.2

Bitcoin’s insane energy consumption, explained | Ars Technica
▻https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/bitcoins-insane-energy-consumption-explained

Bitcoin’s energy use should decline in the long run

Blockchain scalability - O’Reilly Media
▻https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/blockchain-scalability

The three main stumbling blocks to blockchain scalability are:

1. The tendency toward centralization with a growing blockchain: the larger the blockchain grows, the larger the requirements become for storage, bandwidth, and computational power that must be spent by “full nodes” in the network, leading to a risk of much higher centralization if the blockchain becomes large enough that only a few nodes are able to process a block.
2. The bitcoin-specific issue that the blockchain has a built-in hard limit of 1 megabyte per block (about 10 minutes), and removing this limit requires a “hard fork” (ie. backward-incompatible change) to the bitcoin protocol.
3. The high processing fees currently paid for bitcoin transactions, and the potential for those fees to increase as the network grows. We won’t discuss this too much, but see here for more detail.

#énergie #environnement #gaspillage #électricité #bitcoin #blockchain #pauvreté #économie

New Memo: #Kissinger Gave the “Green Light” for Argentina’s Dirty War
▻http://m.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/01/new-memo-kissinger-gave-green-light-argentina-dirty-war

Only a few months ago, Henry Kissinger was dancing with Stephen Colbert in a funny bit on the latter’s Comedy Central show. But for years, the former secretary of state has sidestepped judgment for his complicity in horrific human rights abuses abroad, and a new memo has emerged that provides clear evidence that in 1976 Kissinger gave Argentina’s neo-fascist military junta the “green light” for the dirty war it was conducting against civilian and militant leftists that resulted in the disappearance—that is, deaths—of an estimated 30,000 people.

In April 1977, Patt Derian, a onetime civil rights activist whom President Jimmy Carter had recently appointed assistant secretary of state for human rights, met with the US ambassador in Buenos Aires, Robert Hill. A memo recording that conversation has been unearthed by Martin Edwin Andersen, who in 1987 first reported that Kissinger had told the Argentine generals to proceed with their terror campaign against leftists (whom the junta routinely referred to as “terrorists”). The memo notes that Hill told Derian about a meeting Kissinger held with Argentine Foreign Minister Cesar Augusto Guzzetti the previous June. What the two men discussed was revealed in 2004 when the National Security Archive obtained and released the secret memorandum of conversation for that get-together. Guzzetti, according to that document, told Kissinger, “our main problem in Argentina is terrorism.” Kissinger replied, “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly. But you must get back quickly to normal procedures.” In other words, go ahead with your killing crusade against the leftists.

The new document shows that Kissinger was even more explicit in encouraging the Argentine junta. The memo recounts Hill describing the Kissinger-Guzzetti discussion this way:

The Argentines were very worried that Kissinger would lecture to them on human rights. Guzzetti and Kissinger had a very long breakfast but the Secretary did not raise the subject. Finally Guzzetti did. Kissinger asked how long will it take you (the Argentines) to clean up the problem. Guzzetti replied that it would be done by the end of the year. Kissinger approved.

In other words, Ambassador Hill explained, Kissinger gave the Argentines the green light.

That’s a damning statement: a US ambassador saying a secretary of state had egged on a repressive regime that was engaged in a killing spree.

#Criminel #Argentine #dictature_militaire #États-Unis “#nos_valeurs”