Dear everyone using the word "blockchain", whether working with one or writing about it: for the love of all that is holy, take five minutes out to do a Google

Dear everyone using the word "blockchain", whether working with one or writing about it: for the love of all that is holy, take five minutes out to do a Google search and at least read and understand the top hit or two before jumping on the bandwagon. A blockchain is not the same thing as the Bitcoin distributed ledger implementation. The concept of an append-only chain of blocks of data linked by hashes is one small component of Bitcoin, and your own application need not be constrained by all the other design decisions Bitcoin has taken just because it happens to use a blockchain. Specifically, Bitcoin may choose to use a proof-of-work competition to impose an ordering on its distributed ledger, but there is nothing about the blockchain concept itself that forces you to do the same thing. The field of network synchronisation has been well studied since the 70s and many alternative solutions exist; almost all non-Bitcoin applications have more relaxed requirements for anonymity, peer trust, consensus and decentralisation, so there is rarely good reason to pick a solution that "uses about the power output of Ireland".