Slashdot Mirror
Corporate America's Blockchain and Bitcoin Fever is Over (axios.com)
S&P 500 executives are dropping blockchain buzzwords less on earnings calls and during presentations to analysts and investors. Analysts are also asking about it less. From a report: The hype was just that. The odds of a company turning blockchain "headlines into reality" are slim, as Forrester Research predicts. The prospect of incorporating blockchain technology or cryptocurrency into businesses excited investors and drove up share prices temporarily -- just look at Kodak, beverage company Long Blockchain, or Hooters franchisee Chanticleer Holdings -- so it's no wonder executives wanted shareholders to know that they too might get in on the new technologies. At the peak earlier this year, "blockchain" was mentioned 173 times, according to an analysis of company transcripts by Axios. The number has since fallen as much as 80%.
Blockchain and huge power requirements aren't synonymous. Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies that use the technology are where the power usage is, and that is because it is actually built into the algorithms for the currency.
Blockchain methodologies are actually very cheap to compute and use, it just the matter of other resource usages over time as the "chain" spreads out and is housed in more places in part or in whole. A big chain can be many, many petabytes in aggregate stored over hundreds and thousands of machines. That doesn't even cover the bandwidth required to transmit all of that data. Granted, some chains are "self contained" in that they aren't spread widely, mainly used in house, but they can be anywhere in between.
Anyway, that's my take on it. Not an expert by any means. Some some schmuck with an opinion.