Lets talk about blockchains
The rest of the article is good, but this part is wrong:<p>>This can be incredibly useful, and is necessary for some applications.<p>There is no reason to have a system "without trust", the very idea of that makes no sense and there is no such thing as a system "without trust". Examples: To even use a computer or use a computer network you have to on some level trust the manufacturer of the systems as well as the supply chain that built it. To use any blockchain you have to trust that at some point it's not going to get 51% attacked. To use any businesses that work on the blockchain you have to trust those businesses on some level instead of just trusting "the blockchain" or a smart contract, if eventually you expect to receive a good or service that transfers into the real world, because agreements about those things can only be upheld by lawyers, not blockchains. The amount of entities you have to trust to realistically interact with any blockchain is massive. The idea that they're somehow "trustless" is simply wrong.<p>And I've made comments about this before but I'll make it again. Blockchains are useless and are unnecessary for every application. They do nothing that isn't better achieved by another consensus mechanism. The only reason to use PoW/PoS or any of the other blockchain consensus algorithms is to use them to implement cryptocurrency, which is only useful as a form of unregulated and volatile and mostly useless money that you can pay people in those tokens for running the network. If you can come up with any other way to pay people to run a network, then you don't need cryptocurrency.