Worth a read. I've insisted blockchain's going to change the world but..maybe not? Maybe there's not actually a use. 10 years is an eternity in terms of tech development.
The original intended use of the blockchain was to power currencies like bitcoin — a way to store and exchange value much like any other currency. Visa and MasterCard were dinosaurs, everyone proclaimed, because there was now a costless, instant way to exchange value without the middleman taking a cut. A revolution in banking was just the start… governments, unable to issue currency by fiat anymore, would take a back seat as individual citizens transacted freely outside any national system.
The killer feature: knowing you can get your money back It didn’t take long for that dream to fall apart. For one thing, there’s already a costless, instant way to exchange value without a middleman: cash.
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Plus, it’s not actually that good a payment system — Visa can handle sixty thousand transactions per second, while Bitcoin historically taps out at seven. There are technical modifications going on to improve Bitcoin’s efficiency, but as a starting point, you have something that’s about 0.01% as good at clearing transactions. (And, worth noting, for those seven transactions a second Bitcoin is already estimated to use 35 times as much energy as Visa. 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.)
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In terms of interbank payments, many people mention Ripple as a promising way to transfer money between banks. Over the last 30 days it processed two billion dollars (as of this writing) worth of interbank and interpersonal transactions — about 40 seconds’ worth of volume on the SWIFT interbank network — after three years of being available to banks to trade 90% of the world’s high-volume currencies.
Submitted December 23, 2017 at 11:15PM by unfixablesteve http://ift.tt/2piebX4
