
Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain - pwaai
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/26/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-for-blockchain.html
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sincerely
On mobile but the original essay ([https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-
has-come-up-with-...](https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-
with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100)) has definitely appeared on HN
before

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bcbrown
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15994571](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15994571)

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tromp
> If you brought Bitcoin's transaction volume up to Visa's it would be using
> as much electricity as the rest of the world put together.

Nope; that's not how it works. Bitcoin's energy use scales not with the block
size but with the value of the block reward. If bitcoin prices rise, more hash
power will be applied to compete for it. And when the reward halves, many
mining outfits become unprofitable and will be turned off.

~~~
_up
Bitcoins transaction volume is capped, because of the block size limit. So
rising the transaction volume isn't even possible. At least not without Miners
aggreeing to a fork. This is also why the prices are so high. Miners have an
incentive to not change block size because they earn much more money if their
product (transaction spots in the block) is scarce.

~~~
chrisco255
It still stands that the transactions themselves aren't what are costing
energy. I do think the miners incentive to keep fees high is a perverse side
effect of the system. In this respect it's healthy that hard forks and
altcoins are present to put competitive pressure on BTC core to evolve.
Lightning network, if implemented, should do much to improve the situation.

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arisAlexis
among the gazillion uses timestamping is one of them and pretty important

