Blockchain is a useless technology(glennchan.wordpress.com) |
Blockchain is a useless technology(glennchan.wordpress.com) |
Personally I think that bitcoin-style blockchains are pretty useless outside of some very specific cases. Consensus between parties that don't trust each other is pretty much what our entire system of banks, governments, and lawyers (when things go wrong) was created to deal with. Replacing all that with an simplistic algorithm is the worse case of Engineers Disease.
I know that a some people have made a lot of money from bitcoin - good luck to them. And bitcoin does have some value if you want to move value around without those pesky government controls. But I don't see how the whole system will not just fade away once the smart people have extracted all the money from the suckers.
But I don't have any bitcoin, feel free to ascribe this comment to sour grapes.
on the shoulders of other people
>Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-...
Blockchain technology seems to be the ultimate case of a solution in search of a problem. I'm sure there are some niches where it maybe useful, but the hype around it is so absurd it borders on the religious. How often do you see comments here, for example, professing faith in its glorious, inevitable future? It's sometimes like talking to a fervent Christian about the Kingdom of Heaven that will come when Jesus returns.
I'm sure there are some niches where it maybe useful
What a small niche indeed.
If a loaf of bread is going to cost 1 milli-btc today and 2 milli-btc tomorrow, that will simply wreak havoc in the society. Most folks just want a stable predictable life with as little volatility as possible.
Say what you want about modern central bankers, they have kept things mostly stable. 2008 crash was the worst thing happened on their watch, which is mild in comparison to other horrors of the past (like great depression).
Blockchain's primary utility has nothing to do with money. An attempted alternative to fiat currency is just an easy, obvious application of the distributed ledger/consensus capability that a blockchain offers.
This myopic focus on "blockchain == cryptocurrency" misses so much of the point, it would be laughable — if it weren't tragic.
Or maybe people want the point to be something other than it was.
Yeah, that's the laughable part.
None of their criticisms of Bitcoin are novel.
* fast payment confirmation and network capacity - for BTC, the Lightning Network. Plenty of alt coins have solutions for both of these
* overhead that does not cost billions of dollars a year - there are alternatives to PoW
* account security - paper and hardware wallets
I've been wondering this as well. Surely someone must have a rough idea when Bitcoin will tank.
I mean like a Big Short-style idea. I understand people are straight pumped about bitcoin but I don't care about those people; I want to know when Bitcoin will pop.
There must be someway to figure this out.
-John Maynard Keynes
He basically completely ignores the idea of a blockchain as a way for non-trusting parties to quickly and easily agree on truth but then makes the argument that since the smart tech companies AMZN, FB, and GOOG aren't offering blockchain services, that the technology must not actually have any real use cases, another ridiculous point.
Truth of what exactly? It would seem like many useful applications require off-chain oracles which completely subvert the point of the block chain. The only truths I can think of that two non-trusting parties could agree upon is are outputs of deterministic algorithms (i.e. math/logic/hard truth), which has to be utterly useless to the real world, except maybe to harness idle computational to compute prime numbers, PDEs, etc. (i.e. still pretty useless). I'm clearly missing something if all of the hype is warranted and would appreciate if you could point me to any resources/examples that cover this.
And yet, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Intel are solving their customers’ needs on a daily basis. Could it be that blockchain tech is in its infancy like the Altair was at Xerox PARC?
I’m not sure what repulsed me more: the author’s smug attitude, or the trash design of his blog riddled with ads.
Still it will be interesting to see a survey - Maybe Coinbase can run it on their platform on what a novice cryptocurrency investor thinks blockchain means. Is it a coin or bitcoin or technology?
I also find the betting against cryptocurrencies using AMD a fascinating hypothesis. Any traders on this forum have insights on this?
To ignore that at this stage in the game makes me think the author is a trader looking at the tech from an investment perspective.
If bitcoin can challenge banks & money printing machines even a little then it kind of achieves its goal, and I think is happening already otherwise you won't see so much bad press, don't tell me bankers are just trying to inform, they are really worried about me losing money speculating on bitcoin, they didn't cared when they crashed the economy in 2008, also I saw a news story the other day, the poland central bank or so, paid 30k euros to a famous local youtuber to trash bitcoin.
Is the author short Riot Blockchain? Because that's an easy one to short. Maybe Long Blockchain Corp? Kodak?
I wouldn't call 3 ads on a 3.7k word article "filled with ads".
that apparently burns more electricity than me, my children, my grandchildren and so on until the 50th generation and over
Have you computed the amount of electricity consumed by the actual financial system, payment systems and banks ?
That's the myopia. If you (the general you) can't see the difference, I'm not the one who's short-sighted.
That someone can come along later and imagine (though not really demonstrate) other uses of an underlying technology is fine and dandy, but it's definitely not myopic to think that the person who initially created and linked the two concepts wasn't stupid.