I didn’t a blockchain would be more efficient than a computer. I said it would be more efficient than a Raspberry Pi. And yes, of course a blockchain needs electricity, but the cost and burden of running the blockchain is covered by transaction fees, which you only pay when you’re actively engaging with your app, which is different than the Raspberry Pi where you need to pay when your app is idle.
It seems impossible that a blockchain would provide an useful amount of service when compared to a Raspberry Pi.
A smart contract is more or less the same idea as an AWS Lambda. But in AWS, you trust AWS to compute on your behalf. In a blockchain, you don't. Trust is replaced by enormous amounts of redundancy where every node recomputes everything to make sure everything was done right. So there's no scaling. The capacity of a single node and a million nodes is the same.
Right now, the cost of storing 1KB of data on ETH seems to be about $17. At the same price you can have a 128GB SD card, which is 128 million times more storage. A Pi will cost you $35, and $5/year in electricity if running 24/7 at full power.
Again, it’s not about the raw cost, but about not needing to worry about the cost and having things run “forever”. Even if you use AWS, you still need to pay your bill every month.
I don’t really understand your argument, tbh. Like what if you have an app that only needs to serve 1 KB of data. From your own calculation, it would be much more cost effective and operationally effective to use a blockchain. But you seem to be saying that doesn’t make sense because you could serve 1 KB from a more expensive thing with over provisioned storage.
> Again, it’s not about the raw cost, but about not needing to worry about the cost and having things run “forever”. Even if you use AWS, you still need to pay your bill every month.
It's not free though, you're hoping that the system is kept up by other people paying for it.
And in general blockchains are very obtuse to actually interact with. Pretty much everyone is using a centralized, traditional interface to it. Which means you might as well do it the old boring way.
> I don’t really understand your argument, tbh. Like what if you have an app that only needs to serve 1 KB of data.From your own calculation, it would be much more cost effective and operationally effective to use a blockchain.
If you need to serve 1KB of data, there's lots of places that'll do it for free. Github, pastebin, random forums, etc.
The point wasn't that I want to store 1KB. The point is that even a insignificant amount of data, the sort that is a rounding error on modern hardware, is already quite expensive to store.
> But you seem to be saying that doesn’t make sense because you could serve 1 KB from a more expensive thing with over provisioned storage.
I'm addressing your "I said it would be more efficient than a Raspberry Pi." by making some quick calculations to show that the blockchain is not just behind a Pi, but literally millions of times worse. It's not only not competitive, it's not anywhere near the same ballpark even.
Blockchains need power and internet, and run on hardware that needs maintenance and degrades over time.
> Someday, I believe blockchains will be more efficient and have fewer downsides than a Raspberry Pi.
A blockchain can never be more efficient than a computer because:
1. It runs on top of computers, and does extra stuff. Extra stuff inherently has costs.
2. Blockchains are based on very low trust systems and use trickery to overcome it. This has enormous costs.