Bitcoin's cousin ethereum is trying to position itself to be one of those winners among the business community. Developers have created a new blockchain that would reduce its energy consumption to almost zero and allow it to scale as well as improve security, said Mike Goldin, a software engineer at ConsenSys, which builds applications on top of ethereum.

If we get to a place where ethereum scales 10,000 X, a million X, but it's using a million X energy ... game over," Goldin said. "We'd have to drain the power of the sun to power this blockchain. If we scale ethereum, but we don't also scale the power consumption, it's useless.