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A comment on Blockchains are the new Linux, not the new Internet. Parent comment

Re:Blockchains are the new Linux, not the new Internet by harryh on Sunday May 28, 2017 @06:03PM (#14436279)
I don't think the relevant comparison is the cost of an Etherium transaction to the cost of a hotel room. I think the relevant comparison is the cost of an Etherium transaction to the cost of a transaction to a proprietary database.

Distributed consensus transactions are MUCH MUCH more expensive than transactions to centralized databases. Is that extra cost worth eliminating the disadvantages of centralization that you cite? Maybe. But that's not at all obvious to me.

Keep in mind that a transaction on the block chain currently costs about $11:

144blocks/day * 12.5btc/block * $2100/btc / 335000transactions/day

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Re:Blockchains are the new Linux, not the new Internet by jpatokal on Sunday May 28, 2017 @06:29PM (#14436373)
The extra cost here is not the cost of the DB write, but the rent extracted by the owner of the database. For example, access to flight bookings data starts at thousands of dollars/month.
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Re:Blockchains are the new Linux, not the new Internet by harryh on Sunday May 28, 2017 @06:39PM (#14436407)
Yes, that is certainly one of the "disadvantages of centralization" that I was referring to. Again, it's not clear to me that that cost will be higher than the additional costs of writing to a distributed consensus database (which are very very high).
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