HN Bandwagon, Monday: "Don't you understand that courts exist to make it so no one can break a contract without penalty?"
HN Bandwagon, Tuesday: "Lol don't go to court over $5, that's stupid."
We already have costs built into the current system (e.g. cc fees to make up for fraud, security systems around protecting gold + cash). Electricity is just the cost of that specific system - I think calling it a waste is not necessarily justified.
It happens to be that the EU is such a "someone". In EU countries, CC interchange fees are limited to 0,3%, debit fees to 0,2%, effectively resulting in much cheaper rates to be paid by merchants (whether big or small) for card acceptance.
Thoughtful legislation and an effective, fair and trusted executive branch, both with the necessary checks and balances, trump any blockchain, at least as long as we are talking about legal transactions.
In the EU where people don't want the system to work like that interchange fees were capped in 2015 at 0.2% for debit and 0.3% for credit [1]. If that's what you want, there's a proven model for establishing it. In Australia it's capped at 0.88% for credit and the greater of 16.5c or 0.22% on debit [2].
Did you know Bitcoin alone ALREADY used 0.5% of world electricity at the end of 2018, even though nobody really uses it? [3] It's like we're all paying a 0.5% surcharge on top of everything we do, which is double the price of EU interchange. Just to support some ancap pyramid scheme that people agree solves largely 1 class of problem: payments for illegal goods and services, while pretending to solve all the worlds problems, just poorly.
[1] https://www.adyen.com/blog/all-you-need-to-know-about-the-eu...
[2] https://www.adyen.com/blog/card-processing-in-australia-just...
[3] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180516131236.h...
(The small fraud problem is one reason I think micro payments can't happen: you can't investigate sub-cent fraud, but if someone can automate it they can steal a lot.)
> there's a multi-layered system in place to resolve disputes, starting from the customer support call center, reviews, bad publicity, and going all the way to the courts.
So no, I don't think the plan is to go to court over every contractual dispute.
Furthermore, it reinforced my original point that it's really not all that reassuring that the (slow-moving) legal system will enforce contracts, because it's an expensive process, and you need other protocols on top of that in order for trade with untrusted parties to work.
As of the edit, the parent seems to agree. So maybe my comment wasn't as stupid as you're implying, and maybe there's a reason that commenters mark the late changes to their posts as edits.
One of my frustrations with discussions of blockchain is how quickly it diverges from reality. Most financial disputes today are resolved without a lawsuit or a prosecution, which I think you know. And transacting $5 via blockchain today will involve 3rd parties with whom you could develop a dispute, and then you'd be right back where you would be for any other $5 transaction.
As it happens — and not that it matters to you — I agree that the small-transaction-with-untrusted-party case is not a good use of blockchain.
I was only objecting to the OP’s implication that courts are sufficient to ward off all contractual violations. As of the edit, the OP clarified s/he didn’t mean that, and so I’m in agreement with him/her, but that apparently doesn’t stop you from lecturing me as if I weren’t.
>when you can't use contracts and the legal system to ensure trust between the parties
If a threat to sue over the violation of small amounts is not credible, the court system doesn't help.
Like a certain business model that currently runs into large issues because of the costs of litigating small transactions, and would be improved through block chain.