A number of limitations make blockchain less widely adopted

Although blockchain technology is no longer a new thing, at present, its application has not been widely implemented. This article introduces some of the limitations of blockchain.

Blockchain technology first appeared in 1991 with the purpose of application for text time stamps. But it was not until 2009 that the blockchain was actually realized to create the first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. Bitcoin's blockchain is a fully transparent and secure distributed ledger. In addition to the current popular application of cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology promises to bring about a revolution that will impact many fields, such as digital music copyright management, digital voting, medical record keeping. International, smart legal contracts ... Blockchain is considered a breakthrough invention, even compared to the Internet.

While this technology offers a lot of benefits, including high levels of fraud protection and cost-effective trading methods, it may not be able to be applied as quickly and universally as expected. wait. Like most other technological innovations, the world faces difficulties in changing and adapting to deploy blockchain.

Here are some of the limitations of blockchain that make this technology still have many difficulties in deployment and application.

Waste energy

Bitcoin mining in particular and cryptocurrencies in general rely heavily on GPUs (Graphics Processing Unit - graphics processing units) and ASIC (Application-specific Integrated Circuit) to be able to profitable for miners. GPUs require a large amount of electrical power and are always ready to operate stably.

By the beginning of 2019, the electricity consumption for Bitcoin mining has reached 68.14TW / hour. This is an extremely large amount of electricity, even estimated to be higher than the energy consumption of 159 different countries.

Therefore, maintaining data and ensuring integrity for blockchain is an extremely energy-consuming process. In today's era, with 6W processors for laptops featuring deep sleep states for electronics and solar cells, all for the purpose of saving and less reliance on energy, the massive energy consumption of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency mining is a major limitation.

Large amount of data

In general, the Internet is an effective means of data transmission. The user requests information and the server retransmit the requested data. The transmission of information requires only a small amount of additional data.

However, in order for the data to be protected, as well as to prevent fraud and attack, blockchain technology needs a lot of copies of itself scattered across nodes, requiring a large amount of storage capacity. For example, as of early 2019, Bitcoin's blockchain has a capacity of over 200GB and will not stop there.

Moreover, each transmission of blockchain data consumes a lot of power, making the technology inefficient and economical. In the current era, as video is becoming more and more compressed to reduce download data, the bulky blockchain is an issue to consider.

It takes time to deploy

Blockchain technology may be appropriate for some areas, but widespread deployment will be a time-consuming process, especially for industries that have their own ways and regulations.

Some industries, like legal and medical, are just beginning to change from paper records to digital records and in some cases still keep paper copies as backups. These industries will find it difficult to immediately switch to a new technology solution and are still in the development stage like blockchain.