Sustainability design in the age of bitcoin

To survive in the 21st Century, organizations and individuals alike should seek to emulate it

“Decentralization”. Source: Foundation for Economic Education

Over the past few months I have encountered various discussions and analyses on what is required to make a system, product, organization or organism last a long time — not just 5 or 10 years but 100+ years:

• In Money, blockchains, and social scalability, Nick Szabo argues that the most valuable trait of bitcoin and other blockchain projects is its in-built inefficiency: massive energy consumption by custom-built computers solving cryptographic puzzles for which the “sole output of the computation is just a proof that the computer did a costly computation”, and the need for every full node around the world to maintain the entire blockchain. In Szabo’s words, “the secret to Bitcoin’s success is that its prolific resource consumption and poor computational scalability is buying something even more valuable: social scalability.”
• The Energy Gang podcast spent time dissecting how US Energy Secretary Rick Perry conflated grid reliability with grid resiliency — today we have grid reliability (at least, everywhere but Puerto Rico), but it remains fragile and needs increased resiliency with distributed, local generation and localized storage capacity.