Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future
The criticisms of blockchain tech have become so incoherent that there may be cause for confidence again.  Full circle!<p>&gt; There is no single person in existence who had a problem they wanted to solve, discovered that an available blockchain solution was the best way to solve it, and therefore became a blockchain enthusiast.<p>It&#x27;s amazing to me that this person finished this sentence and didn&#x27;t, in the time it took to type it, realize how flatly wrong it is.  Every corner of the USA, online and otherwise, has satisfied customers who were able to purchase psychoactive compounds online despite the prohibition against them.  This is a wonderful application of blockchain tech and, as a solution, has produced many enthusiasts.<p>Moreover, society benefits generally from drug prohibition being undermined, and this too has produced more indirect enthusiasts.<p>However, this phenomenon serves to show the blockchain&#x27;s fitness, not the limits of its reach.<p>Many of us spend our days working on blockchain tech that is far more mundane and unlikely to grab headlines, but also fits more cleanly into current legal and political structures.  What has the author to say of that?<p>&gt; The number of retailers accepting cryptocurrency as a form of payment is declining, and its biggest corporate boosters like IBM, NASDAQ, Fidelity, Swift and Walmart have gone long on press but short on actual rollout.<p>Borrowing from the previous confused critique: are any blockchain enthusiasts (regardless of their original fount of enthusiasm) also enthusiasts for these giant, largely outdated companies?  The fact that these companies have tried and failed to integrate blockchain tech is, in the minds of most enthusiasts, a positive sign, not a negative one.<p>&gt; Hm. Perhaps you are very skilled at writing software. When the novelist proposes the smart contract, you take an hour or two to make sure that the contract will withdraw only an amount of money equal to the agreed-upon price, and that the book — rather than some other file, or nothing at all — will actually arrive.<p>Not a critique of blockchain tech, but of open source software generally.  And a bad one.<p>&gt; “Keep your voting records in a tamper-proof repository not owned by anyone” sounds right — yet is your Afghan villager going to download the blockchain from a broadcast node and decrypt the Merkle root from his Linux command line to independently verify that his vote has been counted?<p>I&#x27;ll note the racist overtones here without further comment.<p>I will, however, point out that no blockchain voting system has ever been proposed with such a UI.<p>&gt; These sound like stupid examples — novelists and villagers hiring e-bodyguard hackers to protect them from malicious customers and nonprofits whose clever smart-contracts might steal their money and votes?? <p>Yes, they sound like stupid examples.  They are stupid examples, designed precisely for use as a strawmen in this stupid essay.<p>&gt; A person who sprayed pesticides on a mango can still enter onto a blockchain system that the mangoes were organic. A corrupt government can create a blockchain system to count the votes and just allocate an extra million addresses to their cronies. An investment fund whose charter is written in software can still misallocate funds.<p>I have no idea what point the author is making now.  Can anyone clarify?<p>&gt; The contract still works, but the fact that the promise is written in auditable software rather than government-enforced English makes it less transparent, not more transparent.<p>This has not been history&#x27;s experience with government-enforced English.  By ignoring this fact, the author allows himself to indulge in arguments that don&#x27;t make sense in order to make points that don&#x27;t matter.  Such as...<p>&gt; Eight hundred years ago in Europe — with weak governments unable to enforce laws and trusted counterparties few, fragile and far between — theft was rampant, safe banking was a fantasy, and personal security was at the point of the sword. This is what Somalia looks like now, and also, what it looks like to transact on the blockchain in the ideal scenario.<p>...and...<p>&gt; Silk Road, a cryptocurrency-driven online drug bazaar. The key to Silk Road wasn’t the bitcoins (that was just to evade government detection), it was the reputation scores that allowed people to trust criminals.<p>But I think the author&#x27;s most dangerous fallacy is actually his apparent fear that systems of &quot;alternate&quot; trust or consensus somehow threaten to push out systems in which trust is currently serving well.  For example:<p>&gt; Projects based on the elimination of trust have failed to capture customers’ interest because trust is actually so damn valuable. A lawless and mistrustful world where self-interest is the only principle and paranoia is the only source of safety is a not a paradise but a crypto-medieval hellhole.<p>I have met and worked with dozens of movers-and-shakers in blockchain tech, and I have never, ever met anyone who&#x27;s politics are fairly characterized as advocating &quot;A lawless and mistrustful world where self-interest is the only principle and paranoia is the only source of safety.&quot;<p>Quite the contrary: I think that there&#x27;s a realization that small batches of community cooperation work quite well, and that trustless technology has the capacity to out-compete the violent regimes that threaten it, such as drug prohibition, fiat currency, and environmental recklessness.<p>The author concludes with the only paragraph in his essay which is sensible and sober:<p>&gt; As a society, and as technologists and entrepreneurs in particular, we’re going to have to get good at cooperating — at building trust, and, at being trustworthy. Instead of directing resources to the elimination of trust, we should direct our resources to the creation of trust—whether we use a long series of sequentially hashed files as our storage medium or not.<p>On these points, we agree.  However, these points are not supported by the rest of the author&#x27;s essay.<p>Clear thinking and reasonableness need to be the orders of the day.  Cooperation and compassion need to be the acts of our daily drive.  And, so far as I can tell - the many scams and holdovers from yesterday&#x27;s economy not withstanding - blockchain tech is full of these things.<p>We all want peace.  We all want freedom.  And yes, we all want trust and strong communities.  The idea that blockchain tech is a threat to these things is confusion at best, fear-mongering at worst.