While blockchain is an interesting development, it also inherently a niche solution
suitable only for creating an open, trust no-one ledger. The technology is slow, its
capacity a handful rather than tens of thousands of transactions per second,37 and
it takes over 10 minutes for a transaction to appear on the ledger. It’s expensive
to run, with the current mining community consuming US$1.5 million in value a
day, placing the average cost per transaction around US$8.25 at current volumes
or, if you prefer an environmental measure, roughly 157% a US households daily
electricity consumption required per transaction. Blockchain’s ability to store data
is limited to 80 bytes per transaction. It has also reached its current performance
limits at fairly modest transaction volumes, around 1/10,000th of VISA’s, which
doesn’t bode well for a future of incremental refinement. Finally, we should note
the nature of blockchain’s proof-of-work approach means we can never be sure a
transaction we’ve submitted to the blockchain, but which we haven’t yet seen in
the ledger, will ever be accepted.