Can't say that my mind is truth, but still decided to present them! I'd like to hear your opinions and maybe even to argue with you! Because in a dispute born truth! I apologize for some confusion, just I'm not really a writer, and to write this article I had a lot of work! Thank You!
Everyone says that blockchain, as the underlying technology of cryptocurrencies, will change EVERYTHING. But after years of efforts and multibillion-dollar investments nobody has the good idea of using blockchain, apart from crypto-currency speculation and illegal financial transactions.
In all described cases of use - from payments to legal documents, from deponation to voting systems the authors relied on all kinds of gimmickry to implement a distributed, encrypted, anonymous registry, that was of no need. And what if there exist no need to use a distributed registry? What if lack of major projects based on the distributed registry after a decade of development is because no one needs them?
Payments and Banking
Originally, blockchain was designed to be used in crypto-currencies like bitcoin - a method of storage and exchange of values, much like any other currency. Visa and MasterCard have been declared dinosaurs, because now a free and immediate way appeared to exchange values without middlemen, who collected fees. The revolution in banking was only the beginning ... the governments that are no longer capable to carry out issues will move to the background, because citizens will be able to transfer money outside of national systems.
It didn’t take long for the fantasy to have collapsed. On the one hand, we already have a free and immediate way to exchange values without middlemen – it’s cash. Bitcoins replace dollars, but Visa and MasterCard are warm in dollar banking transactions, providing a set of value added services like tracing of fraudulent fees and identification of buyers and sellers. It seems that for the person who pays for the goods, the main feature of the new payment system - as for PayPal in its early years - is the confidence that in case if the product is faulty, he can get his money back. And for the person, who gets payment, the main feature of the payment system is the confidence that customers really pay money and want to use this very system. Add points, credit lines and free baggage checking in on all United Airlines flights - and you'll get a system that the users choose and the traders use. Actually, no one wants to pay bitcoins, so they haven’t skyrocketed yet.
Furthermore, this payment system is not that good. Visa can process 60,000 transactions per second, and bitcoin historically is at a standstill with 7. There are technical modifications which allow to increase the effectiveness of bitcoin, but as a starting point you have something that seems like no more than 0.01% of clearing transactions. And it should be mentioned that for these seven transactions per second bitcoin spends now about 35 times more energy than Visa. If you bring the frequency of bitcoin-transactions to 60,000 per second, then you need as much energy as can be produced in the world.
Opportunity to transfer funds without supervision of the Government In numerous countries, the opportunity to do something without watchful eye of the authorities makes the world a better place. In Cuba as well in Venezuela, many choose to transfer money in dollars, and bitcoin in theory may have the same function. But there are at least two reasons why this crypto- currency has not become the desired panacea: superiority of the government over individuals and superiority of the government over society.
The Government-sponsored banking system provides deposit insurance, guarantees convertibility of transfers, verification of identity, audit standards and investigation system in the event of problems. Bitcoin, by definition, doesn’t have any of that. Once I came across a remarkable forum thread, in which people wrote whose bitcoin-wallets were emptied because of hacked mail and stolen passwords. They were overwhelmed, because they cannot be rescued! And it is widespread: in 2014, the Mt. Gox company, then the largest bitcoin trader, lost $ 400 million of its users because of holes in security system. The next largest bitcoin trader, Bitfinex, also closed after losing users money. Just imagine the world where banks would rather loose depositors' money than multiply it. Bitcoin is a medieval banking business: "here's your libertarian paradise, have a nice day."
This problem is very close and clear to me, because my own True Link company was created to help vulnerable older people - who are ready to disclose their credit cards numbers on the phone, take part in muddy bettings or donate money to dubious organizations, invest in fraudulent companies or install a program for crossword puzzles that steals passwords. These people are most in need of developed means of protection in the banking and payment systems, they are heavily dependent on up-to-date security features and will be the first victims of the proposed changes for the sake of implementation of instant, identified with a private key and irrevocable transfers. The one who takes banking security as friendly to people, would have invented something very different from blockchain!
In addition, the decisions generated by the government are aimed at opposition to terrorism financing and organized crime, at fight against prohibited goods circulation like stolen credit card numbers or child pornography. Accordingly, the principal need is to make transactions private, but in so doing they could be opened on instructions from security agencies. Ask the people: "Should the government be at liberty to get by order a list of all to whom you’ve paid" - and the majority will say no. Ask: "Should the government be at liberty by order to get a list of all who were paid by the collector of child pornography" - and the majority will answer "yes." No one wants bitcoin to increase 100 times the volume of goods circulation which regarded as prohibited. As one beatcoin enthusiast told me, "if you invented cash today, it would also be prohibited."
Micro-payments and bank-to-bank TransfersNow let's talk about two situations in which blockchain currencies held the promise of especially bright future: micro-payments and bank-to-bank transfers. As for payments, the enthusiasts press upon free and instant bitcoin-transactions. Although, actually, one transaction takes about 8 minutes, and its processing costs about 4 cents. We are offered to use bitcoins for micro-payments - for example, to pay two cents to a musician for listening to his song on the net, or four cents for reading a newspaper article. But the infrastructure intended for this purpose, for instance, the preliminary authorization of source of funding - so you don’t have to wait 8 minutes to read the article you just clicked on - actually doesn’t even require use of bitcoins. If you are happy with the price of four cents for an article or two cents for a song, then pay once a month from your bank account. In practice, people prefer subscriptions rather than micro-payments.
With regard to bank-to-bank payments, many people remember Ripple as a promising way to transfer money between banks. At the time of writing the article, 2 billion dollars of interbank and interpersonal transactions were processed over the last 30 days - approximately 40-second volume of SWIFT interbank network - after three years of banking trade 90% of highvolume currencies. It’s like contribution of toothpicks sales to US GDP. Why banks haven’t choosen this new technology? The thing is, that set up of Ripple gateway is not very different from use of the existing correspondent account system - except that loss of password or token may lead to much larger and faster losing. A bitcoin-exchange, I’ll remind, is more likely contributes to this, rather than prevents this. The same properties of the banking system attract both users and banks. There are already registries there that needn’t to be distributed, anonymized, encrypted, issued and made irrevocable
“Smart” contracts"Smart" contracts are contracts in the form of software, and not legal documents. Storage in blockchain allows them to make value transfer based directly on the cryptographic agreement between the parties. That is, "smart" contracts are "self-executing." In theory, the contracts written in the form of software are cheaper for interpretation : since they operate in a literal sense mathematically and automatically, there are no two ways of interpretation, and therefore expensive legal battles are of no need.
And in the real world there are already examples of problematical character of this approach. The most promising and big contract to date, or an investment structure called the Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO), allowed its participants to invest direct with use of private cryptographic keys to select investment destinations. No lawyers, no commissions, no behind-the-scenes meetings.
DAO "excluded the possibility of erroneous investment and losing of funds by directors and financial managers". And because of the program bug, DAO "voted" to "invest" $ 50 million, one third of investors’ money, in a structure controlled by very smart programmers, who got a lot riding on recursion problems when updating the balance. Someone thinks that it was a hack or exploit, because the software was not working the way it supposed to. Others consider that there wasn’t any hack - the essence of software was just the autonomy of decision-making, this can’t be interpreted in two ways, and if you don’t understand how this software works, then there was no need to participate. As a result, all the participants voted retroactively to reimburse the software contract and return the money to their true owners. What is the conclusion? Even the smartest blockchain enthusiasts actually want a lot of people to argue about the real goals of the contract, but not let software to be self-executed. Maybe, the "stupid" way, as a result, turns out to be the most intelligent?
DAO was a model experiment, but what about routine transactions in large companies? Investors and startups in the field of smart contracts promise that blockchain will provide super-fast execution and payments, for example, in health care - "instead of waiting for processing of applications for 3-6 months, or spending hours on phone calls in an attempt to get your bill paid, a smart contract can in theory be processed immediately". But this is true for any software shopping systems. Amazon servers used by my company are automatically scaled according to traffic to the web-site, and we only pay for actual use.
It is incorrect to assume that smart - contracts would change this. They mean a legal agreement that comes into effect alongside with the software, and the legal agreement itself is also presented in the form of software. Amazon's terms of service are not a smart contract, but the billing system that support these terms is automated. And the reason for the lack of automation, say, in medical insurance billing, is not that the existing software is not smart enough to handle incoming applications and their electronic payment, but that insurance companies are slow themselves either historically, or because they prefer people to check applications.
After all, everybody beginning with blockchain enthusiasts and ending with insurers are eager to discuss properly the essence of business relations and interpret them on an ongoing basis, and only then develop software dealing with processing and payments. Everything already existing is a status quo.
Distributed storage, computing and messagingAnother unbelievable idea of using blockchain is mechanisms of distributed storage. At first glance, it is quite sensible: you break your documents into "blocks", encrypt them and insert them into a distributed journal... it is scattered across a lot of machines, it's safe and all its operations can be traced easily.
But there exist a lot of great ways to split files, encrypt and replicate them among multiple storage facilities in different places. There is already a company that is proven to be a cheaper alternative - distributed Dropbox, encrypting and storing files on numerous users' hard drives and paying them out small levy for the space used. Blockchain is an especially inefficient and unsafe way of distributed storage.
Blockchain approach has 4 further drawbacks.
Firstly, you rely on a single encryption point-your private key-and not on a more complex system that can use two-factor authentication, intrusion detection, volume limits, firewalls, remote IP tracking, and ability to disable the system in emergencies.
Secondly, price compromises are not plausible at all: Bitcoin blockchain has already consumed electricity for almost a billion dollars, which was wasted on data hashing, which take about 1/6 of the volume of Dropbox subscription at 10 dollars per month.
Thirdly, the systematic choice of where and to what extend the data can be replicated, is profitable in the long term. And blockchain has distribution of data by default that is not so very clever.
Finally, Dropbox, Box.com, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and many other companies provide a set of other useful features that you wouldn’t want to develop yourself. By analogy with Visa, the problem is not in the data storage, but in the management of permissions, the cancellation of the shared data access you have share earlier, in obtaining a visual history of documents, in synchronization between multiple devices and much more.
The same arguments are also true for distributed computing and for secure messaging applications. Encryption, permanent storage and distribution throughout the network are a huge unnecessary job in comparison with the main task. There are perfect solutions for computing, messaging and data storage, equipped with all the necessary encryption and replication products, and they are better than solutions based on blockchain - and with a bunch of additional wonderful features, too.
It was loudly announced that NASDAQ has launched an internal stock exchange for private shares on the basis of blockchain. But wait. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the whole idea of NASDAQ (or, for instance, the depositary trust and clearing company) is that it has a register with information, who owns shares and what kind of shares they are? Surely they worried that their systems without blockchain would soon be unable to trace the balances?
As for some other tasks related to transaction tracing, such as "buyer-seller" payments, the difference between the NASDAQ registry and blockchain is that blockchain is distributed - this solves the problem of lack of an authorized middleman. And today for legal transactions, the company itself, its transfer agent, a clearing house or the stock exchange are all authorized middlemen, that usually offervalue-added services. The reason why NASDAQ is a correct birthplace for stock exchange based on the blockchain, is that there are experts in compliance with legislative requirements and in providing security in trade of stock. Remove the middleman (in this case, the NASDAQ itself) and the government from the chain of middlemen, and you’ll have only companies that are addressed at end runs with legal systems, compliance systems and tracing systems common for the major market. People, who sell shares that are not admitted to the stock exchange would tell you, that it’s a guarantee of losing your money.
And we have already seen this. New companies have started to create "coins" on the basis of blockchain, which are convertible into shares of the companies, and sell them publicly during the Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) as a cheap and more flexible way of raising money compared to the traditional Primary Public Organization (IPO) of shares within exchange house. Be interesting to see how long this insanity will last - among other things, the offer of tokens converted into shares is considered the "coins" are only less secure electronic certificates of shares, protected only by your concern for the password, and not by the laws and protection of securities exchange - or this is another attempt to bypass the law..
Authenticity The following plausible use of blockchain: suppose, you want to make a public, invariant and unremovable signed statement, and you can "issue" it in blockchain. That is, a distributed journal may be considered something like a diary, and not a way of buying and selling. Theoretically, you can use it to record votes in elections, check the origin of diamonds or branded equipment, verify identity, determine the ownership of domain names, check money storage on escrow accounts, publicize temporary sealed patents, notarize, and so on.
If you do not go into details, then all these ways of using blockchain are not sustainable. Today, the usual practice is in elections to record the total number of ballot papers in the vote so that the voters throw original paper copies into the boxes, and journalists and observers keep an eye on these boxes.
A serious problem of voting is the registration of voters and anonyms, as well as certification that the number of voters is equal to the number of votes. Paper bulletins allow to make it much better than blockchain.
For notarial tasks, checking your driver's license or having witnesses known to you mean lack of signature with a stolen password or private key. But if a password or a private key matches, then you can just issue sh the document signed by the PGP-key. To verify the authenticity of branded goods like watches or bags, or to check the ethics of diamonds mining, there is no point in a distributed and encrypted journal, it does not add any value. Producer can simply attach a certificate verified on the site, as it was done earlier. In the case of depositing, a smart contract can automatically pay for the goods without third party verification and withhold funds, but you still need an authorized party to verify delivery of the goods, their quantity and quality.
Finally, if you need to prove undeniably that you have learned something at this hour, without disclosure of the information, then encrypt it and sent it on e-mail to yourself, or post it in Bitbucket, or type it and notarize, or send it to yourself with a paper letter, or write in Twitter md5-message, or do something like that. But again, how big is the industry of undeniable -proof-that-you-have-learned-something-at-this -hour -time-without-disclosure? Can you recall any major company, or just any company that provides such a service?
As for domain resolution, process of identifying, which servers have to see traffic and respond to your requests when entering the URL in the browser, it seems that a fully digital record of smart contracts, when the fact of payment is issued in the registry, also updates domain resolution scheme, obviate the need in escrow services for domains. However, in practice, as in the case of DAO or other smart contracts, if valuable domains change owners as a result of theft or security problems, then you need to rewrite the journal, for example, by court order. The history of bank accounts supported by the government and the laws repeats itself: true companies are not eager to find themselves in a situation in which hacking or stealing passwords can lead to someone's eternal and irrevocable domain ownership of bankofamerica.com, or disney.com, or sony.com and so on. Blockchain introduction increases the risk of theft or substitution, and does not decrease them. It feels a bit theoretical until you recollect that the leading bitcoins-exchanges often become victims of hackers - and this very rarely happens to large domain providers.
So what’s left?That would sound trivial: everyone knows that certificates of authenticity with ID numbers are attached to the goods, which can be checked on the manufacturer's website - except that in each case millions, if not tens of millions of dollars, were spent on companies to solve these particular tasks. You can come up with even more esoteric solutions: Second Life on blockchain; or blockchain -application, allowing washing machines to order washing powder via a smart contract; or sports leagues in which the decisions of coaches are recorded on blockchain (seriously!).
As a result, the advantages of existing human and software systems related to transactions - from person identification with a driver's license to call and explanation of the provisions in a disputed credit transaction, to the automatic charge-off from your credit card for a newspaper subscription - outweigh the expected benefits, as well as hidden costs or irrevocable automatic execution. Blockchain-enthusiasts often behave as if A have problems with getting money from B, or it is difficult to keep a record of what happened. In each case, money transfer or transaction registration are in fact simple, cheap and highly automated parts of much more complicated systems.
And as a result, we have come back to the beginning: currency speculation and illegal transactions. Maybe with incidentally received lesson. In conversations with bitcoin-entrepreneurs, investors and consultants, I often evidence lack of knowledge or even interest to the way how different processes are being performed today or what value is for the end user. Despite all the money spent on bitcoin cash desks, nobody yet conducted a survey of whether the majority of credit card owners eager to abandon their airmiles in exchange for losing the opportunity to dispute transactions. Probably, all these people think that the high cost of IPO and the difficulties in documentation for the foundation of a venture fund are associated with all these lawyers and economists who do nothing for their wages ... of course, a bunch of 20-year-old clever engineers without experience in the industry can automate the work of these parasites just within a few months and for several million bucks of venture capital.
But so far, they are not very good at that.
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