Do Energy Consumption, Privacy and Quantum Computing Pose a Threat to Blockchain Initiatives?

In the previous articles of this series, we discussed the most important challenges blockchain must overcome to become mainstream. Energy consumption, privacy issues and the threat of quantum computing are also often cited as challenges. However, they are mostly platform-specific, and not that big of a deal, in our view. In this blog post, we will dive deeper into these challenges. We will also explore how some platforms have addressed them and why others have not.

Energy consumption

Blockchain platforms are often attacked in the media for their energy consumption. You’ll see articles about how Bitcoin consumes more energy than Switzerland, for example. The truth about this is a lot more nuanced. But even if we agree to the fact that Bitcoin consumes a lot of energy, this is not true for blockchain in general. In fact, there are already many blockchain platforms that don’t spend such huge amounts of energy. Bitcoin’s high energy consumption has largely to do with the “proof of work algorithm” in its blockchain protocol. Therefore, we don’t view energy consumption as a blockchain challenge, but rather as a Bitcoin challenge. On the other hand, proof of work is considered the most robust protocol at the moment, so in that sense, the challenge is finding an alternative that is equally robust but more energy efficient.

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