Why should you bother with blockchain, since it has lost ~82 % of is value since December 2017?

True it went from 19000 USD/bitcoin to only 3500 USD/bitcoin, but price is only important if:

• You need to speculate to earn some quick money.
• You need to sell your blockchain coins.

It is more important to see:

• What is happening with blockchain and
• What it can be used for, rather than only looking at it’s price.

It’s more than digital money

If you want a web page today, then you will either have to host it yourself or pay someone to do it. If you pay someone, then you trust that their security and governance is good enough.
For example we trust that:

• Google Drive will keep our data secure, take the necessary backup, keep the servers up 24/7.
• Facebook will keep my account information secure (for example the password). Keep up the servers 24/7. Giving a service that I can reset my password, when I have forgotten it.
• Amazon that I can have a secure database, computing power and other functionality through their AWS (Amazon Web Services).

Imagine a set of companies hosting a blockchain, where you could put your homepage on this blockchain. You would pay the blockchain and the payment would be distributed to all the hosting companies. The blockchain automate security – for example your data on the blockchain is not only encrypted, but also fragmented and even the hosting companies would not know, what content they are hosting. The blockchain automate governance – for example, there are always multiple copies of a blockchain, synchronizing them making it more robust than most other hosting services and giving a very reliable backup method.  

Now imagine having a blockchain version of Google Drive, Amazon, Facebook or any other cloud service, where Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. can host it, but don’t have any access to your data, unless you give them access.

Scalability

Ethereum was the first blockchain that could host web applications, its problem was that it couldn’t scale properly. For example, when a game called Crypto Kitties came out on Ethereum, it managed to slow Ethereum transactions down by 83 % – and that was just a single application, which popularity was non-existing compared to regular web applications (2). Ethereum had only 15 TPS (transactions Per Second), which was twice as big as Bitcoins 7 TPS, but without scaling it could never compete with VISA’s 1700 TPS.

3rd generation blockchain

EOS is a 3rd generation blockchain that came out in May 2018. It can scale properly and managed to outperform all the other block-chains in only two months, achieving 3000 TPS (Transactions Per Second), even outperforming VISA’s average 1700 TPS. EOS managed to get 17000 TPS on the EOS test-net, giving it the lead in the blockchain race to achieve a million TPS (5)

What about energy consumption?

The energy consumption of Bitcoin reached ~73 Terawatt hours, which is 170 % of Peru’s total energy consumption (6). A single bitcoin transaction uses as much energy as 300000 Visa transaction would. A single EOS transaction uses as much energy as 5 Visa transactions, which is a huge improvement, but still 400 % more than Visa. At least EOS managed to completely offset its Carbon footprint (7), which is another huge step forward.

Developer popularity

Ethereum requires the programming language Solidity, but not many developers know it. If Ethereum became popular, more developers would learn Solidity, but so far this has not happened. EOS on the other hand supports C++, Python (8) and .NET (9) making it easy for developers to make their own Dapps (Decentralized apps) and new block-chains atop of the EOS blockchain.

Future of blockchain

A million transactions per second build on top of green energy and support existing developers skill sets is the perfect environment for innovation. The future of blockchain is not about money transactions, but transactions of anything, without the need to involve a 3rd part, like a bank, publisher, political party, etc. Here are some examples of EOS Dapps that normally would require a 3rd party:

• Karma, a social network designed to incentivize users to do good in the world and receive KARMA points for helping out mankind. Read more at: https://www.karmaapp.io/
• The Everipedia IQ provides a new paradigm change and knowledge economy to disrupt the old centralized internet knowledge encyclopedia model similar to Wikipedia. By creating a new incentive structure and a distributed backend hosted within a blockchain, the new Everipedia knowledge base will be able to improve upon all fundamental features of Wikipedia. Read more at: https://everipedia.org/
• PIXEOS, where artists can publish their art and get commission requests for Visual Arts and Creative Media services. https://pixeos.io/
• Blankos is a next generation kind of Minecraft, where players can own digital assets, by creating, collecting, and trading. Unique items have verifiable scarcity and usefulness, which will create new markets and online economies. https://blankos.com/

References:

1. https://www.cryptokitties.co/
2. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42237162
3. https://blokt.com/news/eos-smashes-blockchain-records-with-transaction-speeds-faster-than-visa
4. http://eosnetworkmonitor.io/#
5. http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/3838646
6. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
7. https://eosauthority.com/green/
8. https://github.com/eosnewyork/eospy
9. https://github.com/eosnewyork/EOSDotNet