I’ve heard this too. It strikes me as a pretty strong indictment of the value of blockchains…ostensibly they could be good for all sorts of things, but somehow you need to run the deliberately-energy-wasting currency speculation or else nobody will care to maintain them. That’s not what useful looks like.
Lots of things seem kind of similar if you ignore all the details. I think once you get past the very superficial level of “new tech that people were concerned about” you will find there isn’t much of a rhyme here.
Agreed, but I’m not sure what incentive there is to run something doing that validation in the decentralized case.
Interesting, a friend that graduated at the same time as me was looking at this (c. 1993-1995, I think) was looking at “digital cash” as a grad at CMU, IIRC. The people that think deeply about such things are a small group now; they were an even smaller group then. You and him might have even crossed paths, even if only digitally, who knows.
As to technoalarmism, I’m not specifically talking about any one person’s (here or elsewhere) assessment. Certainly not yours. You and I seem to have similar technology experiences, by the way. It just seems to me that some of the current feelings in general are motivated by that, yes, but of course not everyone is motivated from their ignorance. Some obviously have specific value judgements.
I have reservations about blockchain over many things, but, for the most part, I try to separate the actual technology from those attracted to it, those that created it, and the motivations being ascribed to them (many are still anonymous, so I can make no definitive claims there other than what I feel might be true). I certainly think there are certain people attracted to it that are there for explicitly bad faith reasons, like those using it for ransomware.
And I think, for better or worse, it is going to exist far into the future. Most can opt out of it and ignore people chattering on about blockchain if it bores/annoys them. But, like you, I have suspicions that it won’t remain that way for very long, most especially if you work in the tech space in the near term, but it’s likely to be something as pervasive as the 'net is now. I think pump and dump schemes and the speculation overall are scammy; I don’t believe the concept itself is.
On a public blockchain, for example, you could have a limited number of trusted authorities who themselves benefit from its existence doing all the validation. The blockchain itself would still be de-centralised but the validation of additions to it more centralised.
The key is to break past the dysfunctional mindset of the only incentives being market-based financial ones, a mindset firmly in place amongst the Libertarians who designed blockchain and quickly transformed it into yet another of their money-making scams.
Trust is the key factor here, as it is in many aspects of technology. Libertarians, in a typical act of paranoid projection, have trouble trusting anyone else because they assume we’re in a Hobbesian war of all against all. 40 years of that ideology setting the stage for fascism’s return engagement shows us how well foisting that mindset on everyone works out.
You can’t do that with cryptocurrency. The anonymous creators of Bitcoin (the first Blockchain application) were not shy about sharing the anti-statist ideological agenda behind their effort. It’s right there in the original white paper.
Blockchain could go either way. Cryptocurrencies definitely for the worse.
I don’t think it’s superficial at all. I remember people snickering about Google’s IPO price, and I remember people making jokes about how Amazon will make a profit (as they were losing money) by “volume”, and they took nine years to turn any profit. The proponents/detractors seem to be made up of nearly the same types of groups/people.
That’s not to say that there won’t be harm from blockchain, but again, this is exactly like the 'net. The 'net has destroyed/decimated entire industries, and combined with automation, AI and big data, will continue to do so. Same with pollution/energy use externalities - a term like “the cloud” obscures just how dirty the net really is.
If you’re saying you see no real “killer app” applied at scale for blockchain (i.e., is it useful), you may be right - at this moment in time. But I’d never claim that will remain true for the long haul. If we were to compare it to Gartner’s hype cycle, we are probably in the “trough of disillusionment” part.
Sorry, comparing technologies through things like stock prices…which is basically a way of looking entirely at hype around them…rather than what they were doing is pretty much the most superficial resemblance I can imagine.
There is by the way an important difference between energy waste from cryptocurrency and other industries, which is that it’s not incidental. Proof of work is designed to use as much energy as you can afford. You can make a data center be more energy efficient, but currency speculators will just speculate more with the same results. That’s why it’s considered so inherently toxic.
I can certainly imagine future applications in securities trading etc. But does that mean that I have any reason to buy any of the current crypto currencies?
Not really. The general public’s critical view of cryptocurrencies as inherently wasteful and not being grounded in any real value is right on.
Pets-dotcom was rightly mocked for its business model, but all those 20-lb bags of dogfood they shipped for free actually served a real-world purpose for consumers. So did the products that Amazon shipped at a more calculated loss, so did Google’s search results (because information and data one can use has value). Bitcoin serves no such purpose.
That approach basically gives you Git (a distributed version control system for software, originally written by Linus Torvalds, the author of the Linux operating system). Linux kernel developers “clone” the repository which – like a blockchain – has a complete, cryptographically secured history of the development of the Linux kernel, and improvements to the Linux kernel software proposed by individual developers make their way to Linus Torvalds, who puts them into the official version (“validates” them) which is then shared (“pulled”) by all developers.
But if what you really want is Git, a blockchain isn’t the solution. So far, given that traditional databases and things like Git exist and are in widespread use, blockchains are a solution in search of a compelling problem.
Exactly. Blockchain is really only useful for a handful of low-trust and privacy-intensive situations, ones in which proof of work validation might not be needed. Open-source repositories aren’t one of those situations (the recent incident where a disgruntled developer poisoned a repository is a rare one).
There are plenty of existing and tested ways to implement a distributed ledger/database. Blockchain technology was developed to reflect and serve an anti-social mentality of greed and paranoia.
That’s the thing: whenever anyone proposes a “here is a use for blockchain which isn’t bitcoin!”, then in every case I’ve seen, there’s already a well-understood and more efficient way of doing it.
It’s always an ex-post-facto rationalisation for blockchain. Which is to say, blockchain a fascinating idea, but it was invented as a platform for bitcoin, and bitcoin is not a replacement for money if only because money doesn’t need the power output of an entire medium-size nation just to keep existing.
That, and the fact that Bitcoin doesn’t really work as money anyway. With Bitcoin, by construction there is a hard upper limit of around 7 transactions per second (VISA claims they’re doing up to 65,000), and it can take quite some time for your transactions to actually end up on the blockchain unless you’re prepared to attach a fairly high transaction reward to make them look more interesting. Not what you want for grabbing a cup of coffee on the go. Even most Bitcoin advocates these days have gone off the idea that Bitcoin will ever replace real money.
(People have been trying to work around the 7-transaction-per-second limit for ages now, with little success. One approach, the “Lightning Network”, is trying to keep transactions off the blockchain and generally sucks. Another approach would be to increase the block size on the blockchain, which was tried in 2017 in the shape of Bitcoin Cash, proved hugely unpopular with large swathes of the Bitcoin community, and eventually became an epic fail.)
If these two propositions always come together—indeed, if shills bizarrely suggest they must always come together—and we know B is a scam, it’s reasonable to conclude that A is also a scam
I don’t fully agree. While blockchain technology was indeed originally created to enable what became the cryptocurrency scam, in the years since others have seen (an admittedly very limited number of) other use cases where it might be suitable in the absence of existing alternatives.
“Bitcoin and other leading crypto coins experienced a significant drop in share price after investors began dumping mining equipment as China announced fresh regulations.”
