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