Consensus Décentralisé - Blockchains - Smart Contracts - Decentralized Consensus

This article features the slides shown during Consensus 2017's opening remarks on the 'State of Blockchain'.

CoinDesk Research authors a quarterly industry overview report that summarizes key trends, data and events in the public and enterprise blockchain sectors.

The full 'Q1 2017 State of Blockchain' report, which expands on much of the material presented below, will be published shortly after Consensus.

It's been an eventful 2017 so far in the blockchain space.

Public protocols have gained over $40bn in market cap, enterprise consortia have formed and flourished, and the push towards interoperability can be seen across the ecosystem.

Regulation has shifted the composition of global trading volume, the usage of the industry's own investment structure continues to gain steam, and the amount and quality of traditional financial and technology giants getting involved in blockchain has never been higher.

CoinDesk Research also recently tapped into the community to gain more intimate insights into the perception and sentiment around bitcoin and ethereum and garnered north of 1,100 responses.

Below, we highlight some of the largest takeaways from the presentation:

• Bitcoin averaged 287,000 transactions per day at fees averaging $0.62 each, leading 67% of the surveyed community to say they feel 'bad' about the current state of transaction fees and confirmation times
• More people now view bitcoin as a 'digital gold' than a 'digital currency' and 86% of the community believes ethereum can be used just as well as a medium exchange or payment method
• 47% believe we will see a contentious hard fork of bitcoin, and rather than preferring SegWit or a block-size increase, more individuals believe some combination of solutions is the best short-term scaling solution
• The majority of the community believes we will see the Lightning Network live on bitcoin, and both Raiden and proof-of-stake live on ethereum in 2018
• The overall state of bitcoin is nearly exactly split between positive and negative responses, while less than 5% of people responded negatively to the current state of ethereum
• Despite Hyperledger's multiple open-source frameworks, live proof of concepts, 130 plus member list and backing by the Linux Foundation, 87% of people have slight to no knowledge of the group
• Enterprise Ethereum Alliance launching in February was seen as the primary price driver of ether in Q1

A new virtual gold rush is underway.

Even as Bitcoin, riven by internal divisions, has struggled, a rival virtual currency — known as Ethereum — has soared in value, climbing 1,000 percent over the last three months.

Beyond the price spike, Ethereum is also attracting attention from giants in finance and technology, like JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft and IBM, which have described it as a sort of Bitcoin 2.0.

The rise of the relatively new virtual currency has been helped by a battle within the Bitcoin community over how the basic Bitcoin software should develop.

The fights have slowed down Bitcoin transactions and led some people to look for alternative virtual currencies to power their businesses. Enter Ethereum.

Like Bitcoin, the Ethereum system is built on a blockchain in which every transaction is recorded publicly. The promise of such a system is that it allows the exchange of money and assets more quickly and more cheaply than relying on a long chain of middlemen.

But Ethereum has also won fans with its promise to do much more than Bitcoin. In addition to the virtual currency, the software provides a way to create online markets and programmable transactions known as smart contracts.

The system is complicated enough that even people who know it well have trouble describing it in plain English. But one application in development would let farmers put their produce up for sale directly to consumers and take payment directly from consumers. There are already dozens of functioning applications built on Ethereum, enabling new ways to manage and pay for electricity, sports bets and even Ponzi schemes.

All of this work is still very early. The first full public version of the Ethereum software was recently released, and the system could face some of the same technical and legal problems that have tarnished Bitcoin.

Many Bitcoin advocates say Ethereum will face more security problems than Bitcoin because of the greater complexity of the software. Thus far, Ethereum has faced much less testing, and many fewer attacks, than Bitcoin. The novel design of Ethereum may also invite intense scrutiny by authorities given that potentially fraudulent contracts, like the Ponzi schemes, can be written directly into the Ethereum system.

But the sophisticated capabilities of the system have made it fascinating to some executives in corporate America. IBM said last year that it was experimenting with Ethereum as a way to control real world objects in the so-called Internet of things.

Efficiency of mining hardware

I started with the the amount of operational mining hardware (measured as the hashrate in number of hashes per second), and the efficiency of the hardware (which can be measured in Joules per hash).

The total bitcoin mining network currently comprises a calculation speed of over 800 petahashes per second, which requires over 10,000 metric tonnes of hardware, considering that even the newer machines weigh over 12 kilograms each (15 grams per GHash/sec. on average in the analysis below). That is enough material to build another Eiffel tower.*

In the beginning of the bitcoin phenomenon, miners used any laptop or computer to generate bitcoins. As the difficulty of mining bitcoin increased—part of the cryptocurrency’s design—miners upgraded to graphics cards, and then more sophisticated hardware. The state of the art is dedicated bitcoin mining chips (called application specific integrated circuits, or ASICs). ASICs have been available for three years, so we have a small basis to explore the improvements in the efficiency of mining hardware.

Let’s have a look at the efficiency of those ASIC miners over time. I took an existing comparison of bitcoin mining hardware, to which I added a few miners myself and looked up all their first shipping dates, based on various sources (company specifications, blog-posts, first reviews, etc.). After exclusion of the ones that were never actually shipped to customers, and after exclusion of some of the early highly inefficient ASIC miners because they didn’t fit any trend, I ended up with a list of 53 types of bitcoin miners and plotted their efficiencies against their original shipping dates as can be seen below.

Stephan Tual presents "Blockchain beyond Bitcoin" at Lift 2016. 

Slock.it disrupts the billion dollar disruptors by enabling anyone to rent, sell or share their property without middleman. 

Because it's build on top of the Ethereum blockchain, Slock.it is always on, suffers no downtime, features cryptographic security by default, requires no login or signup, and can be audited by anyone. 

For more information, please visit http://slock.it or follow @slockitproject on Twitter.