Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense
Blockchains are cool. Very, <i>very</i> cool. Merkle trees on their own are pretty cool, and blockchains are just a Merkle tree hashed into a chain-like structure to create work for decentralized verification. This is a very clever concept, and it is the only known solution to the Byzantine Generals problem that doesn&#x27;t involve a centralized authority (that I&#x27;m aware of).<p>What about this is intrinsically &quot;dangerous nonsense&quot;? Honestly, the &quot;bitcoin bad&quot; crowd so often loses me by conflating cryptocurrency - a ledger built on blockchain - with blockchain itself. Personally, I can see all the challenges faced by cryptocurrency and understand the skepticism, but these takes that write off blockchain due to cryptocurrencies&#x27; problems exhibit a sort of surface-level perspective that I can&#x27;t take very seriously. And the fact that such shallow takes keep climbing to the top of HN is shameful, to say the least.