0 customization or adaptation required of ERPNext in either case. You might want to send the hash identifier to your counterparties, however.
Sharing a folder is not really the same thing and is the same as Google Drive, OneDrive, etc. They still require manual intervention to save in the right place, tell the other party and enter the information. Arguably more difficult than emailing, but interesting technologies.
Blockchain does have a very specific usage like most things. You donât put a screw in with a hammer, doesnât make the hammer less useful. And yes bitcoin isnât perfect in terms of energy, transaction capacity and cost. But look how long it took to perfect the engine. Nobody complains about that.
Recording transactions globally without any central trust is a huge deal, especially given the growing mistrust in governments and organisations. Heâs wrong about banks removing funds from accounts. In Spain it is legal for the government to deduct whatever they want from your account without notice. And Iâm pretty sure there are quite a few Russians who wished their funds were in bitcoin right now.
Iâm still struggling to understand why weâd want to use a blockchain for invoicing. What advantages would there be over, say, direct notification with digitally signed certificates?
ERPNextâs Event Streaming layer can already do a lot of the peer-to-peer work. If this is a use case that is important to people, I think itâd be relatively straight forward to add a discovery layer to automate the process.
Not one of those three issues is actually true.
Energy Bitcoiner miners are finding that national grid electricity is far too expensive at the scale they require. Solar and wind farms are preferred. But there are many, many other options; natural gas flare offs are a great example. With no need for off-site power transmission, only a good Internet connection, gas turbines can provide enormous amounts of energy at the well head. Plus, of course, the gas is utilized, and the heat turned, literally, into money rather than simply burned off, into our overheated atmosphere.
Capacity and cost Bitcoin can be used for, but does not target, transactional situations. It is seen, more and more, as a potential international key currency. Increasingly, dollar pegged stable coins are adopting BitCoin as their backing asset in the same sense that central banks stockpile gold, silver and treasury bonds of lead countries (USA, Japan, China, Canada, Australia, etc.) It is easily traded for Solana, Avalanche, Matic, etc, not mention the stable coins (USDT, USDC, UST, DAI, FRAX, etc) that have negligible transaction costs and far shorter transaction times.
I also see little point in that.
More and more national revenue services are requiring electronic invoicing. Not as an option, but as a requirement to staying in business. You shall deliver a signed XML copy of every invoice to the revenue service, and may only deliver it to the customer after revenue service approval. Under these regimes, they can literally put you out of business in minutes if they so choose.
Meanwhile, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have great scope for business solutions. A clear example is digital ownership certificates. If your company sells complex products with serial numbers, warranties, etc. transferable NFT ownership certificates can track owners, transfers, maintenance, warranty status changes, royalties and more. NFT management would be a terrific capability for ERPNext.
I didnât restrict it to just invoicing did I? It was an example amongst others.
Imagine a lot of a companyâs suppliers and customers using ERPNext. Then imagine configuring the Event Streaming. Doesnât sound like fun to me.
Like a decentralised network perhaps? You could do it with multicast or a central server, depends if thereâs an application for seeing the history or offline instances or trust orâŚ
Your points actually prove it is true. The article mentioned says BTC and ETH use the same energy as Austria. I donât think you can claim a solution to that is: âelectricity is far too expensive at the scale they requireâ. Maybe the technology needs to be tweaked to be less hungry?
Which is what you then allude to in your second point. Other currencies have been developed that use less energy, larger blocks and therefore more capacity and less cost. However bitcoin remains with the same problems.
The idea of blockchain is a but complex remember bitcoin minners and remember the system have to create some code each time someone does a transaction in order to alter n make the code difficult to hack so l donât see any relationship with Erpnext itâs as good as starting from a scratch
Nope, you didnât restrict it to invoicing. I donât think I suggested you had. Itâs just the example weâre talking about, no?
It sounds like a lot more fun than managing the bandwidth and overhead of a blockchain, at least to me. I still donât see any advantages of a blockchain over other, simpler encryption and peer-to-peer technologies, but to each their own. 
Youâre right. Itâs âtrueâ that the energy cost is high.
I should have been more precise â energy cost is not a âtrueâ condemnation of BitCoin; itâs a red herring.
It implies that BitCoin mining always exploits national energy grids for profit to everyone elseâs cost. This did happen early on and does still happen in some places, but itâs declining rapidly.
It also implies that the alternatives, traditional payment systems, are much less expensive. If you consider the all-in costs of SWIFT: rolling out the network, armored trenches and conduits, staffing requirements and the cars they drive to get to work, heating the offices and cooling the clean rooms, etc, etc. Then do the same for Visa and MasterCard and AMEX, blah, blah, blah. They ainât exactly cheap either.
Finally, consider the cost of moving gold: armored cars, insurance, gigantic vaults and all the security around those.
With BitCoin, all that extra baggage just goes away like smoke leaving mining as the only cost, and if otherwise âwastedâ energy is used, who cares?
Sidebar: Another fascinating energy source. A large number of irrigation dams around the world were built with future water turbine capabilities incorporated. BitCoin mining companies are renting or buying those spaces in order to install the turbines and set up water cooled mining racks. The deals for gaining those facilities includes supplying low cost electricity and Internet to surrounding community.
Just a friendly reminder:
Letâs ensure these threads remain focused on ERPNext.
Many of us (myself included) have strong opinions about cryptocurrency, blockchain, BitCoin, Ethereum, etc. I encourage everyone to research, learn, and have healthy discussion and debates.
However, this isnât the forum for those. If not specifically addressing ERPNext, letâs consider private conversations or another platform.
âMultitenant ERPNextâ? Does it exist? I remember I asked about this in one of the threads, and Ankush says ERPNext is single tenant only.