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CleanTechnica
Published on December 8, 2018 |
by Michael Barnard
December 8, 2018 of Michael Barnard
Along with our normal daily coverage for clean technology news, CleanTechnica it also produces in-depth reports on various aspects of clean energy and clean transport. One of the emerging technologies we cover is not directly a clean technological innovation is blockchain, which promises to be a catalyst for innovation in the green economy in the near future. Blockchain is probably best known to the public as "having something to do with cryptocurrency and Bitcoin, right?", Which is partially correct, but the technology itself has a wide range of applications, some of which will be crucial in the fields of distributed renewable energy , network management and energy storage, and smart contracts, among others.
The full report Blockchain: an enabling innovator for clean technology, which was published in July, is a deep immersion in the blockchain and its potential, and we will publish further extracts from the report in the coming weeks. (Read the last episode here.)
Bitcoin's high electricity consumption has been widely reported, with a widely (and disputed) estimate that consumed more electricity than 159 countries. However, this is a temporary problem with cryptocurrencies including bitcoins, not an immutable feature.
There are three things that drive the absurd use of Bitcoin power: the artificial shortage that leads to many, many miners, the increasingly harsh competition for the few million coins remaining, and its approach based on evidence of immutability and validity. Bitcoin attributes as currency or value reserve are problematic compared to the most recent cryptocurrencies: it is slow to execute and is expensive to deal with. It will turn into a rarely transformed heritage like fine art paintings in a specialty market, but it will soon reach the peak if it has not already done so. Bitcoin uses proof-of-work or how many CPU cycles a system has dedicated to mining as a primary mechanism to validate whether a source is reliable or not. This is an already obsolete approach to the problem of the Byzantine generals.
With the spread of bitcoin fever, the number of miners competing to win the right to create the next block and then earn bitcoins fired through the roof. This was purely economic. If Bitcoin were half the price, there would be a quarter how many miners. If it were twice the price, there would probably be four times more miners. As it is already 50% off the peak of its pre-new year, the number of new miners entering the market is lower and probably many miners are switching to other currencies.
The problem of Bitcoin, in other words, is a multiplication of problems: high energy to discover the solution * many, many people try to discover the * proof-of-work solution. It is inefficient and inelegant from the point of view of resources, while being elegant as the first engine of the problem of the Byzantine generals.
Even Ethereum is a bit of a bubble, but its consumption is going to fall radically. He used the job test, but is about to switch to his Casper game test model that will substantially reduce mining competition and the like. Proof-of-stake is a model in which the creation of the next block is randomly delegated among the oldest and wealthiest miners. Because validation is simple and no miner is competing to solve computationally difficult problems, the electricity consumption of Ethereum will decrease by a few orders of magnitude. Casper will be a difficult obstacle, so while the old Ethereum will still be around, its problems will become increasingly apparent. There will be a lot of secondary coins created on the Ethereum model that will not follow the fork, but they are also secondary consumers. And it is important to note that the overwhelming majority of cryptocurrencies are based on Ethereum, so if they follow, the overall consumption in space will also decrease.
Nori, a company that has just come out of stealth, is creating the Noriton. It is a cryptocurrency token that represents a ton of CO2 removed from the atmosphere and seized in one of the many possible ways. The key is that it is not a cap-and-trade or carbon tax system, but a system that explicitly values tons of CO2. Like carbon offset programs for flyers and pilots, it allows people and businesses to offset their CO2 emissions with the guaranteed removal of CO2 from the atmosphere.
NEO and Hyperledger are new generation with even lower energy costs and carbon footprints.
NEO uses what it calls the Byzantine delegate Fault Tolerance (dBFT) which is an even more optimized model of gaming. Randomly provides miners with high odds in NEO the right to generate the next block, then the delegation. This is much lower in energy consumption and also allows higher transaction volumes.
Hyperledger Fabric centralizes the creation of blocks in a single resource pool and has multiple validators in the participants. Validation is much simpler than creation and creation will be centralized on a single optimized platform. Furthermore, it is not intended as a cryptocurrency platform, although VIVA has created a cryptocurrency with it. It is a business collaboration engine, which uses intelligent blockchain contracts and an outsourced payment system where necessary, allowing variants of 30 net terms that most of the smart blockchain contracts do not support.
So most of the concern over the use of cryptocurrency energy is going to disappear in the next year. The bubble will break out of stale assets like bitcoin, places like China will block the waste of electricity in the competitive mining sector, and all the others will shift to proof-of-stake variants or perhaps IOTA, which seems to dodge the bullet in a different way .
Stay tuned for more excerpts from Blockchain: an enabling innovator for clean technologyor view the summary and request a complete report at https://products.cleantechnica.com/reports/
About the author
Michael Barnard is Chief Strategist with TFIE Strategy Inc. He collaborates with start-ups, existing companies and investors to identify significant growth opportunities in terms of costs and takeouts in our rapidly changing world. He is editor of The Future is Electric, a publication of Medium. He regularly posts low-carbon technologies and policies at sites like Newsweek, Slate, Forbes, Huffington Post, Quartz, CleanTechnica and RenewEconomy, and his work is regularly included in textbooks. Third-party articles about his analysis and interviews have been published in dozens of global news sites and have reached # 1 on Reddit Science. Much of his work was born on Quora.com, where Mike has been a Top Writer every year since 2012. He is available for advice, linguistic commitments and Council positions.
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