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canopic jug writes:

Digital preservationist, David Rosenthal, has a blog post discussing his recent Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) talk about distributed ledger technology. CNI is a joint initiative of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and EDUCAUSE to promote the use of digital information technologies to advance scholarship and education. The discrepancy between the available capacity in transactions per second and what is actually needed, plus the excessive power consumption, suggests that many attempted uses for distributed ledgers are inappropriate and counterproductive.

I gave a talk at the Fall CNI meeting entitled Blockchain: What's Not To Like? The abstract was:

We're in a period when blockchain or "Distributed Ledger Technology" is the Solution to Everything™, so it is inevitable that it will be proposed as the solution to the problems of academic communication and digital preservation. These proposals typically assume, despite the evidence, that real-world blockchain implementations actually deliver the theoretical attributes of decentralization, immutability, anonymity, security, scalability, sustainability, lack of trust, etc. The proposers appear to believe that Satoshi Nakamoto revealed the infallible Bitcoin protocol to the world on golden tablets; they typically don't appreciate or cite the nearly three decades of research and implementation that led up to it. This talk will discuss the mis-match between theory and practice in blockchain technology, and how it applies to various proposed applications of interest to the CNI audience.

Below the fold, an edited text of the talk with links to the sources, and much additional material. The colored boxes contain quotations that were on the slides but weren't spoken.

Earlier on SN:
BitCoin's Record Drop may have Started Scaring Miners Away
Cryptocurrency Miners Are Building Their Own Electricity Infrastructure

Original Submission