Blockchain is Crappy Technology and a Bad Vision for the Future

[ATN.io]

Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future

Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future. Its failure to achieve adoption to date is because systems built on trust, norms, and institutions inherently function better than the type of no-need-for-trusted-parties systems blockchain envisions. That’s permanent: no matter how much blockchain improves it is still headed in the wrong direction.

The author is a self-proclaimed "Whatever the opposite of a futurist is".


Some of his points:

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.

People treat blockchain as a “futuristic integrity wand”—wave a blockchain at the problem, and suddenly your data will be valid. For almost anything people want to be valid, blockchain has been proposed as a solution. It’s true that tampering with data stored on a blockchain is hard, but it’s false that blockchain is a good way to create data that has integrity.

You actually see it over and over again. Blockchain systems are supposed to be more trustworthy, but in fact they are the least trustworthy systems in the world. Today, in less than a decade, three successive top bitcoin exchanges have been hacked, another is accused of insider trading, the demonstration-project DAO smart contract got drained, crypto price swings are ten times those of the world’s most mismanaged currencies, and bitcoin, the “killer app” of crypto transparency, is almost certainly artificially propped up by fake transactions involving billions of literally imaginary dollars.

Even the most die-hard crypto enthusiasts prefer in practice to rely on trust rather than their own crypto-medieval systems. 93% of bitcoins are mined by managed consortiums, yet none of the consortiums use smart contracts to manage payouts. Instead, they promise things like a “long history of stable and accurate payouts.” Sounds like a trustworthy middleman!

People who actually care about food safety do not adopt blockchain because trusted is better than trustless. Blockchain’s technology mess exposes its metaphor mess — a software engineer pointing out that storing the data a sequence of small hashed files won’t get the mango-pickers to accurately report whether they sprayed pesticides is also pointing out why peer-to-peer interaction with no regulations, norms, middlemen, or trusted parties is actually a bad way to empower people.

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.

What say you guys? (In the most unbiased way possible; I know this is a forum dedicated to everything bitcoin, but we should try to think outside of the box.)

Full article here: https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustless-crypto-paradise-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdec

[CryptoBry]

There are people who are confused with the difference between Bitcoin and the blockchain technology and can be assuming that the two are inseparable. Well, they are both distinct and separate and one should be able to differentiate the two in order to appreciate blockchain technology. Just one big example is what is happening in China right now. While China banned Bitcoin and ICOs, they know that blockchain technology can be helpful and that is why the government is supporting its development. The question of adoption will never happen overnight...it took so many years for Rome to be built as they say. Now, there are people who just love to get some attention they don't deserve by publishing ideas contrary to what is accepted and perceived to be true. Suit yourself as we live in a democracy.

[ATN.io]

While this article also briefly discusses how bitcoin isn't a very functionable currency (in terms of what is believed there is to gain using bitcoin over fiat currencies), it mostly talks about the blockchain itself. Perhaps this isn't the best place to put a discussion about blockchain, but it is related to bitcoin. Though I'll reiterate this is more of a discussion about the actual usefulness of blockchain (the digital ledger/technology behind the cryptocurrency bitcoin).

[Kakmakr]

The writer of the article is very confused. He says, " three successive top bitcoin exchanges have been hacked " and then claim that the Blockchain is not trustworthy because of that. These exchanges run their own code and has nothing to do with the Blockchain, other than them using Bitcoin as a currency. < This is like someone blaming the central banks, because they issued money and that money got stolen, when Massmart was robbed >  

He has to go back to Google to do some more research on exchanges and how the Blockchain fits into that partnership.  

[davis196]

The only statement of this author is that the blockchain is "trustless" and all the centralized "middleman" systems are trusted.And he doesn`t have any real proof to support his claims.I have to say that the blockchain technology still isn`t perfect,but it`s evolving and improving.
Judging a not yet perfected technology for it`s flaws is totally stupid.
30 years ago,there were people,who were saying that the cellphones are a shitty technology and they don`t have any future.This guy is like one of those people.

[Pursuer]

let me tell you what is really happening.
bitcoin price has been dropping for some time and now it has slowed down since it is n ear the bottom. at times like this there will always be a lot of people trying to short bitcoin way too late and also buy bitcoin at the bottom. all of these people will try to undermine bitcoin and the technology even. there is no merit to what they are saying and they always lack understanding of the technology.

[Xester]

I do not believe this statement. Blockchain is actually a good technology. It cannot be only applied to certain currencies but it can applied to any other sectors of the society as well as the government services for transparency. There are already studies being conducted to integrate blockchain technology to the government system, this way the public can view their transactions and corruption could cease.

[Xavofat]

Obviously I'm not going to think that blockchain is totally worthless - that's why I'm here on a Bitcoin forum.  Still, it's worth pointing out that this article makes a lot of pretty bad arguments in attempting to claim that it is worthless.

You actually see it over and over again. Blockchain systems are supposed to be more trustworthy, but in fact they are the least trustworthy systems in the world. Today, in less than a decade, three successive top bitcoin exchanges have been hacked, another is accused of insider trading, the demonstration-project DAO smart contract got drained, crypto price swings are ten times those of the world’s most mismanaged currencies, and bitcoin, the “killer app” of crypto transparency, is almost certainly artificially propped up by fake transactions involving billions of literally imaginary dollars.

The writer uses examples of negative things that have happened with Bitcoin and negative ways that Bitcoin has been used, but these are not examples of blockchain systems being untrustworthy, they're just examples of people who use it being untrustworthy.  The system itself has been running with zero downtime for almost ten years - imagine an IT system that could do that.

Even the most die-hard crypto enthusiasts prefer in practice to rely on trust rather than their own crypto-medieval systems. 93% of bitcoins are mined by managed consortiums, yet none of the consortiums use smart contracts to manage payouts. Instead, they promise things like a “long history of stable and accurate payouts.” Sounds like a trustworthy middleman!

Some blockchain users do use it in blockchain-related activities - for example, when your account is hacked on this forum, you sign a message to get it back.  However, all of these applications are in development and can't be applied to all aspects of people's lives.

[@Hakermania@]

All new technologies meet these criticisms when they are introduced into a human community. It is the fear of the new, of the unknown. Then time do justice to valid innovations.

[cordlesslake]

When the first computer was invented in the 50s, the industrialist who first saw the project asked, "Why would a person have a computer at home?". Many other inventions have received and will receive the same welcome.

[KingScorpio]

Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future

Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future. Its failure to achieve adoption to date is because systems built on trust, norms, and institutions inherently function better than the type of no-need-for-trusted-parties systems blockchain envisions. That’s permanent: no matter how much blockchain improves it is still headed in the wrong direction.

The author is a self-proclaimed "Whatever the opposite of a futurist is".


Some of his points:

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.

People treat blockchain as a “futuristic integrity wand”—wave a blockchain at the problem, and suddenly your data will be valid. For almost anything people want to be valid, blockchain has been proposed as a solution. It’s true that tampering with data stored on a blockchain is hard, but it’s false that blockchain is a good way to create data that has integrity.

You actually see it over and over again. Blockchain systems are supposed to be more trustworthy, but in fact they are the least trustworthy systems in the world. Today, in less than a decade, three successive top bitcoin exchanges have been hacked, another is accused of insider trading, the demonstration-project DAO smart contract got drained, crypto price swings are ten times those of the world’s most mismanaged currencies, and bitcoin, the “killer app” of crypto transparency, is almost certainly artificially propped up by fake transactions involving billions of literally imaginary dollars.

Even the most die-hard crypto enthusiasts prefer in practice to rely on trust rather than their own crypto-medieval systems. 93% of bitcoins are mined by managed consortiums, yet none of the consortiums use smart contracts to manage payouts. Instead, they promise things like a “long history of stable and accurate payouts.” Sounds like a trustworthy middleman!

People who actually care about food safety do not adopt blockchain because trusted is better than trustless. Blockchain’s technology mess exposes its metaphor mess — a software engineer pointing out that storing the data a sequence of small hashed files won’t get the mango-pickers to accurately report whether they sprayed pesticides is also pointing out why peer-to-peer interaction with no regulations, norms, middlemen, or trusted parties is actually a bad way to empower people.

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.

What say you guys? (In the most unbiased way possible; I know this is a forum dedicated to everything bitcoin, but we should try to think outside of the box.)

Full article here: https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustless-crypto-paradise-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdec

the alternative isnt good either, everybody has a pc, but no one has nowadays a money printing device, like the banks do.

[cryptohunter]

author is obviously a fool so why bother quoting such an imbecile here and cluttering the board?

his natural limits are not primed to cope with comprehending fully a decentralised trustless end to end arena

[dothebeats]

Idk why but i find the passage about food safety and trust pointless and dumb. No one said that the blockchain can be applied to everything, and I for one always stress that it's pretty much suitable in almost all banking and finance-related services. Any uses beyond that scope should be highly experimental and may not work flawlessly. In part, I somehow agree with the author since not everything can have the blockchain integrated onto its systems. Most people regard bitcoin as a one piece solution to all the world's problems, but it simply isn't going to happen.

[Simon Eaton]

Blockchain separate from a cryptocurrency is just a glorified database spreadsheet

[ATN.io]

The writer of the article is very confused. He says, " three successive top bitcoin exchanges have been hacked " and then claim that the Blockchain is not trustworthy because of that. These exchanges run their own code and has nothing to do with the Blockchain, other than them using Bitcoin as a currency. < This is like someone blaming the central banks, because they issued money and that money got stolen, when Massmart was robbed >  

He has to go back to Google to do some more research on exchanges and how the Blockchain fits into that partnership.  

This is a good point, people really confuse the security of bitcoin/crypto and the mismanagement of exchanges. These are two different things. An exchange centralizes crypto/blockchain, which in itself is going against the principle of what blockchain is, a decentralized digital ledger.

[ATN.io]

The only statement of this author is that the blockchain is "trustless" and all the centralized "middleman" systems are trusted.And he doesn`t have any real proof to support his claims.I have to say that the blockchain technology still isn`t perfect,but it`s evolving and improving.
Judging a not yet perfected technology for it`s flaws is totally stupid.
30 years ago,there were people,who were saying that the cellphones are a shitty technology and they don`t have any future.This guy is like one of those people.

Yup. Exactly. He needs to go back and read what people were saying about the Internet back during its inception. I don't understand this concept of throwing out the baby with the bathwater just because flaws exist.

[ATN.io]

author is obviously a fool so why bother quoting such an imbecile here and cluttering the board?

his natural limits are not primed to cope with comprehending fully a decentralised trustless end to end arena

It's important to get arguments from both sides. Not everything should be pro-bitcoin and blockchain if we are to be critical thinkers, so I am mainly curious as to what types of counterarguments people have here. I put all of these quotes because I know most people aren't actually going to read the article. Frankly speaking, most of the people we debate bitcoin and blockchain with don't fully understand the technology. Dismissing their arguments is not constructive. It's more important to know how to word a counterargument that might actually teach the other party something. This is the time we need to spend educating people, despite the few years the technology has been around many people still barely even know the basics.

[ATN.io]

Idk why but i find the passage about food safety and trust pointless and dumb. No one said that the blockchain can be applied to everything, and I for one always stress that it's pretty much suitable in almost all banking and finance-related services. Any uses beyond that scope should be highly experimental and may not work flawlessly. In part, I somehow agree with the author since not everything can have the blockchain integrated onto its systems. Most people regard bitcoin as a one piece solution to all the world's problems, but it simply isn't going to happen.

Yes, it's also important to know that blockchain is not the end all be all to all of our problems. Part of his criticism here is that people are waving blockchain around like its a magic wand, and I can understand why that itself may be an issue if we are to promote this type of technology to the public--especially to a public that still does not completely understand blockchain or how it works. 

[amishmanish]

I think the point about trustelssness of smart contracts stands out.

He is not wrong when he says that there is a lot of trust being put into smart contracts to function at various stages like:

1.) The developers are trustworthy and not hide/ ignore bugs in the software.
2.) The publicly auditable software is actually being audited by enough people to be considered reliable.
3.) Even the most robust software will continue to have points of break.

Bitcoin code seems to have been above such failings till now. Though we cannot know a scenario where a fast enough computer would be available to alter the history. You cannot rely on the fact that some secret government somewhere will not fund such a project. All these are plausible scenarios one should consider, if we talk about making the world rely on it.

The solution to this, in my opinion, isn't to shrug shoulders and say, well, blockchain doesn't work because it's too complicated for normal people to understand. The solution, in fact, lies in making the software more accessible and easier to read.
Programming languages have evolved from Binary bits to mnemonics to syntax in English language. Could we, possibly, evolve it into a simple conversational Q&A which will be easy for everyone to understand?
The underlying compiler can be the robust point of trust which could establish itself as  a sort of oracle that can do no wrong and will always give you the right answer. Once you have such a compiler in place, trusted through history of usage and public audit (like bitcoin), you could implement easily understandable smart-contracts on top of it.

The other statement that clearly shows lack of understanding and imagination on part of the author is:

People who actually care about food safety do not adopt blockchain because trusted is better than trustless. Blockchain’s technology mess exposes its metaphor mess — a software engineer pointing out that storing the data a sequence of small hashed files won’t get the mango-pickers to accurately report whether they sprayed pesticides is also pointing out why peer-to-peer interaction with no regulations, norms, middlemen, or trusted parties is actually a bad way to empower people.

The examples are completely unrelated. There is no metaphor-ness in relying on blockchain records to trust whether something actually happened on a product's lifecycle. You are not trusting the farmer's manual record on spraying pesticide. That is what Internet of Things is for. You rely on sensors to upload data onto the blockchain without any human intervention.
If implemented, such a scenario can easily work. Very less human oversight is required to confirm periodically that the systems are indeed being followed to the point.

IOT and Blockchain together can really remove trust/ middle parties from logistics and manufacturing records. It's not like it cannot happen if people like the author find it hard to wrap their heads around it.

[pooya87]

author is obviously a fool so why bother quoting such an imbecile here and cluttering the board?

his natural limits are not primed to cope with comprehending fully a decentralised trustless end to end arena

It's important to get arguments from both sides. Not everything should be pro-bitcoin and blockchain if we are to be critical thinkers, so I am mainly curious as to what types of counterarguments people have here. I put all of these quotes because I know most people aren't actually going to read the article. Frankly speaking, most of the people we debate bitcoin and blockchain with don't fully understand the technology. Dismissing their arguments is not constructive. It's more important to know how to word a counterargument that might actually teach the other party something. This is the time we need to spend educating people, despite the few years the technology has been around many people still barely even know the basics.

it is one thing to have arguments for and against blockchain technology and discuss them, but it is completely a different thing to not understand it or pretend not understating it and make fake arguments. discussing with the later is a waste of time.
this article is basically saying this:
"because blockchain technology is not perfect and because some centralized third party services using cryptocurrencies have been bad, that means blockchain technology is "crappy""
you can't argue with this logic!

~~~--especially to a public that still does not completely understand blockchain or how it works. 

public doesn't need to understand the technology and how it works completely in order to use it.
does the public understand how internal combustion engines work? no but they are using cars.
does the public understand how computers work internally? no but they use computers, cell phones,...