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Comment by c-cube | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting, and mostly right imho. Still no killer app for any blockchain so far, but lots of problems already well known. I'm almost disappointed the author didn't mention the ecological disaster that goes with the energy consumption, instead of just talking about the price.

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yeah proof of work is turning out to be a pretty unsustainable idea - i'm not sure if proof of stake truly can be considered the victor yet but it seems like a huge step in the right direction.

(Completely agreed that there hasn't been a killer app yet in the space - but I think i'm more optimistic about the chances of that happening at some point)

Yeah, I totally forgot that.

If you compare the energy consumption of traditional banking systems to Bitcoin, you will realise how very efficient blockchain is.

Energy efficient in what sense?

If you are comparing the cost per transaction or per amount of money transferred, then I don't see how Bitcoin could in any way be considered more efficient.

I hardly think so. Try scaling up Bitcoin to the world's current volume of transactions and you'll find it uses vastly more electricity than traditional banking systems use.

We are working on it, so watch this space. The power consumption will not increase linearly, because of tier 2 & 3 solutions. The key is that blockchain is automated. With traditional centralised trust systems, you need buildings full of people running everything.

Buildings full of people are a joke compared to the massive amounts of power wasted on mining.

You will scale the blockchain by .... not using the blockchain. Okay.

It's these deluded comparisons that make blockchain proponents look silly. The "traditional banking system" provides orders of magnitude more services than a blockchain. They are just not comparable.

Only because you desperately wish for this to be true, not because it is.

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