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This may have been on here earlier, but a quick search did not find it.
Carrying out a payment with Visa requires about 0.002 kilowatt-hours; the same payment with bitcoin uses up 906 kilowatt-hours, more than half a million times as much, and enough to power a two-person household for about three months.
The rest of the article seems well-written.
source: Blockchain, the amazing solution for almost nothing - The Correspondent
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It's because Ethereum and Bitcoin are based on an already legacy consensus algorithm (Proof of Work). Several better alternatives were devised (if you google blockchain consensus algorithms, you gonna find a bunch of them).
How proof of work works is basically guessing a number (hash), so whoever guesses first, gets the transaction reward. That guess is then validated by the remaining of the network to "prove" it's validity. Because guessing takes resources (computational power), it's not easy or cheap to fake a transaction and convince the network of it. Because to fake the latest "block", you would need to recalculate all the blocks behind it (that's where block"chain" comes from). Every new block's hash is based in the previous block.
So each new block makes it harder to overwrite the network. It's expensive and you sill may not be able to convince the rest of the network, it's not a wise investment. Very likely you will not succeed (otherwise bitcoin and etherum would have been taken over already).
Problem comes when the network grows (in nodes and transactions). The network adjusts itself and increases the difficulty of the guess, because more people are trying to guess. Instead of trying to guess a number from 1 to 10, you start needing to guess 1 to 100, then 1 to 1000, so on and so on. And that's when things become wasteful on Proof of Work based blockchain networks.
So the problem is that Proof of Work does not scale well, driving the energy costs up. Other consensus algorithms such as the one Ethereum is trying to adopt (Proof of Stake) does not rely on computing power to strengthen itself. The miner instead stakes wealth (for Ethereum, it's Ether). So instead of guessing you need to put your valuable crypto on the block pot instead of spending your valuable energy trying guess how much is in the pot. That is what protects the network from attacks. You need to stake a lot of money on an attack and if you're not successful you're going to lose it all.
The challenge of "upgrading" (to be more precise, is to change the algorithm for mining and validation), which Ethereum has been trying to do for years is that you actually need to convince the majority of the network to flip the switch at the same and synchronize it well, otherwise it will fail or interrupt the network. So it's quite challenging to change something in the network once it's widely stablished.
To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems - Homer Simpson
Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction - Francis Picabia
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Very interesting details. Thanks for sharing. 
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A couple of years ago, against my better judgement, and for no good technical reason, just that the customer insisted on blockchain, we implemented an ethereum based payment system for both an online and in-store retail system. We had some supposed experts from the Ukraine working on the ehtereum/blockchain side and they gave us a json rpc API to communciate with to make our lives easier since we weren't working in javascript and didn't know anything about ehtereum/blockchain really.
When we eventually got the initial system working it took almost 15 minutes for a block to be confirmed, and a payment to therefore be considered complete (or at least recorded in a way that was good enough to avoid potential fraud/theft/accidental transaction loss etc). Imagine buying something in a store and having to wait 15 minutes for your payment to go through. Needless to say that didn't work.
I'm not 100% sure what the blockchain team did to solve this, but I think they put some sort of persisted cache in front of the blockchain with some retries back into ethereum if the initial block didn't commit or something. So basically papering over the the cracks in an unnecessary system.
I still can't stop myself shaking my head when I think about it.
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Great story & that really is a head-shaker.
The point of this entire thing is: instantaneous, verifiable transactions.
But I'm probably just wrong. 
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The "distributed" nature of the thing is an illusion; it's a massive duplication of effort.
It was only in wine that he laid down no limit for himself, but he did not allow himself to be confused by it.
― Confucian Analects: Rules of Confucius about his food
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Distributed duplication?
Global Distributed database with many read replicas and one random write replica?
To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems - Homer Simpson
Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction - Francis Picabia
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See my response below. As if blockchain could only be done that way. Which is not true. That's Blockchain alpha, which is bitcoin and etherum. I see many articles like this that portray a very incomplete picture of blockchain and are usually very biased our misinformed.
To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems - Homer Simpson
Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction - Francis Picabia
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David O'Neil wrote: 906 kilowatt-hours, [...] enough to power a two-person household for about three months.
That is assuming you are either living in a rather warm climate, or you do not use electricity neither for hot water nor room heating.
The average Norwegian household uses 16 000 kilowatt-hours a year, 1333 kWh per month on the average. Heat pumps are used everywhere, we switched to LED based light years ago. (Before the heat pump / LED takeover, the average poser consumption was 20 000 kWh/year.)
906 kWh / 3 months is 10 kWh a day. I spend that much even midsummer, on cooler/freezer, hot water, cooking, washing machine, dishwasher and various other electric equipment and tools, and of course a little light for basement/attic or at late night.
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My understanding was that there is a building built with BTC Miners at it's core to generate heat for the building in a cold climate.
Talk about re-use. Proof of work, for "creating" BTC was an important part of the thesis. Eventually all BTC will be created. Then the only money available will be fees for recording transactions. This will be the opportunity to reduce the energy consumed, but the challenge is keeping the miners to keep the network secure.
You saw the drop in BTC, etc over the last few days. I joked that ETH didn't drop as much, because the WHALES (big players/sellers), could not afford the ETH fees! (ETH is so expensive as a network, that it's success is literally killing itself. I am already on 2 other ETH forks to reduce those fees).
Bugs have a WHOLE different meaning when the software is protecting a TRILLION DOLLARS of other peoples money!
The free market is already responding. But blockchain will survive. Square (now block), and PayPal, and many banks are YEARS into their development efforts.
It's the internet era, all over again!
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Thank You An enlightening article Maybe selling the ugly gorilla NFTs mentioned in today's news letter will pay the electric bill By the way here is a suggestion as to how to possibly pay all your electric bills for a very long time Write some AI code which generates thousands of NFTs of ugly gorillas
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As you say, the rest of the article seems well-written, but that figure of 906 kWh per transaction must be nonsense: the figure is not substantiated, and is probably referring to the cost of mining a block of transactions (~3,000 as of 2019).
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Background
My son's fiancee is looking for a job and submitted a cover letter & resume to BigCo.
BigCo responded with:
Please contact 5 references (at least 3 of them must be managers) and have them take this survey about your work.
Survey has numerous detailed questions.
Her best references are the current place she works but of course she can't use those without letting the cat out of the bag.
My Background
I've worked at current place 13 years. (I've worked in IT 30 years.)
If I had to provide 3 manager references they would be from companies where the people wouldn't even remember me.
Additionally
Managers tend to be stooges & the reason I have left companies, soo....
The Poll
Would you be able to provide 3 Managers from your past that you could be confident would give you good responses?
The Point
I think the request by BigCo. is ridiculous & I'm wondering if it seems _normal_ to others.
Thanks
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No. Most previous employers will do nothing more than confirm employment dates.
No previous employer/manager would take such a survey.
Clearly BigCo wants a "reason" to reject her without seeming to be misogynists.
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: Most previous employers will do nothing more than confirm employment dates.
No previous employer/manager would take such a survey.
That's exactly what I thought & said.
We're in US but I thought it (providing survey-level data) wasn't allowed even here.
Thanks so much for your reply.
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Would probably violate HR regulations at the former employer.
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It's legally allowed in the U.S., but leaves a company open to lawsuit. So it is never allowed by company HR policy.
Bond
Keep all things as simple as possible, but no simpler. -said someone, somewhere
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Check out the disclaimer text that she has to include with any reference she contacts.
This whole process is garbage.
snapshot from the sample she was given...
https://i.stack.imgur.com/pmUvd.png[^]
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raddevus wrote: Would you be able to provide 3 Managers from your past that you could be confident would give you good responses?
No, I would not remember them or have any way to contact them. Even if I did, I would not. People change all the time - for good or for bad. So past impressions could be invalid.
"It is easy to decipher extraterrestrial signals after deciphering Javascript and VB6 themselves.", ISanti[ ^]
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lw@zi wrote: o, I would not remember them or have any way to contact them. Even if I did, I would not. People change all the time - for good or for bad. So past impressions could be invalid.
I feel the same way about it.
Thanks very much for chiming in. The hiring process is so broken. It's amazing people even get hired.
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I've been at the same place for 29+ years, 1 manager, alas I am not qualified. 
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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Are you talking about your job or your marriage? 
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